Patricia Benner

Nursing theorist

  • Born: August 1, 1942
  • Place of Birth: Hampton, Virginia
  • Education: Pasadena College (now Point Loma Nazarene University); Pasadena City College; University of California, San Francisco; University of California, Berkeley

Significance: Considered a leading authority in nursing theory, Patricia Benner, an educator and researcher, has authored several books on the subject.

Background

Patricia Benner was born in Hampton, Virginia, in August 1942, the second of three daughters of Shirley and Clint Sawyer. Her father was a shipbuilder. The family moved to Ontario, California, when Benner was in high school.

Benner first became interested in nursing while a student at Pasadena College (now Point Loma Nazarene University). Nursing was not her major—in fact, it was not offered at Pasadena College at all—but she worked as an admitting clerk at the nearby Saint Luke’s Hospital and discovered her passion there. She then began to study nursing at Pasadena City College, and received both an associate’s degree from that school and a bachelor’s degree from Pasadena College in 1964. She then obtained a master’s degree in nursing from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), in 1970 and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1982. She subsequently joined the nursing faculty at UCSF, eventually becoming a professor emeritus. By the 2020s, she had created and continued to oversee a website dedicated to nursing education, contributing articles and videos while maintaining learning modules.

Nursing Theories

In devising her nursing theories, Benner was heavily influenced by the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, which states that there are five basic levels that one needs to progress through to understand a topic in its fullest form: novice, advanced beginner, competence, proficiency, and expertise. Benner elaborated on these levels of skillfulness in her book From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice, which was published in 1984. In tailoring Dreyfus’s theory to focus on nursing, Benner posited that novice nurses are usually students in undergraduate nursing programs. Advanced beginners are those who have graduated nursing school and have been in the field for six months. Competency, the third stage, is gained when people practicing nursing have been in the field for two to three years. Proficiency is attained when nurses have enough experience that they can alter treatment strategies as they see fit. This stage of skillfulness is attained after three to four years of practice. Usually, proficient nurses have advanced beyond the stage of simply following guidelines and can improvise based on their own knowledge and experience if need be. The expert level is attained after more than five years of clinical practice, and nurses at this stage can solve a treatment problem with little to no hesitation. Some nurses never reach the expertise stage, according to Benner.

In her next work, The Primacy of Caring: Stress and Coping in Health and Illness (1989), Benner worked with fellow nurse Judith Wrubel to expand definitions of care as they applied to nursing. Notably, Benner and Wrubel claimed that there is an important distinction between illness and disease. Illness, they asserted, can be described as a negative change in the ability to function, and disease is a physical manifestation such as a cold or influenza. Furthermore, Benner and Wrubel posited that a person’s environment can be more accurately described as their "situation," and that societal context greatly impacts the environment in which one lives. She elaborated on this by saying, "People inhabit their world, rather than live in an environment."

Impact

Benner’s work has been influential in nursing education; she has been described as helping nursing to understand itself. In August 2011, the American Academy of Nursing granted her its highest honor, naming her a Living Legend. She was also elected an honorary fellow of the Academy’s UK equivalent, the Royal College of Nursing. The American Nurses Credentialing Center then honored her with the Margretta Madden Styles President’s Award in 2023.

Personal Life

In 1967, Patricia Benner married Richard Benner. They raised two children together; their son was born in 1973 and their daughter was born in 1981.

Bibliography

Alligood, Martha Raile. Nursing Theorists and Their Work. Elsevier, 2014.

"ANCC Announces 2023 Margretta Madden Styles President’s Award Winner: Dr. Patricia E. Benner." ANCC, 12 Oct. 2023, www.nursingworld.org/news/news-releases/2023/ancc-announces-2023-margretta-madden-styles-presidents-award-winner/. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Benner, Patricia. "Curricular and Pedagogical Implications for the Carnegie Study, Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation." Asian Nursing Research, vol. 9, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–6.

Benner, Patricia. "Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation—How Far Have We Come?" Journal of Nursing Education, vol. 51, no. 4, 2012, pp. 183–84.

Benner, Patricia. "Summary of the Nursing Education in the Knowledge Society." Macau Journal of Nursing, vol. 11, no. 1, 2012, pp. 11–12.

"Biography of Patricia Benner." EducatingNurses.com, educatingnurses.com/biography-of-patricia-benner/. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Sitzman, Kathleen, and Lisa Wright Eichelberger. Understanding the Work of Nurse Theorists. Jones, 2015.