Patricia Benner sought to describe and discover the knowledge involved in nursing practice through her project, Achieving Methods of Intraprofessional Consensus, Assessment, and Evaluation Project (the AMICAE Project) (Altmann, 2007). This project applied a proficiency progression model formulated by Dreyfus to nursing practice. The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition focuses on how skills advance based on experience, education, clinical knowledge development, and career progression through five unique phases (Altmann, 2007). Benner adapted these phases and fine-tuned them in order to make them most applicable to nursing practice and in doing so, came up with the following stages: novice, advanced beginner, competent practitioner, proficient practitioner, and expert practitioner.
Benner’s Five Stages
Stage 1 – The Novice Benner’s Novice stage primarily applies to students when they first begin nursing school (Black, 2014). In this stage, nurses have very little to no …show more content…
The progression between being a proficient nurse and an expert is much less clear-cut than the progression between any of the other stages. During this stage, the expert nurse focuses on the details of the problem without looking at the extraneous information (Murphy, 2012). He/she has become very flexible with high levels of problem solving, and is no longer conscious to his/her decision making process (Lyneham, Parkinson, & Denholm, 2008). There is significantly more automaticity in this stage, making it difficult to state the reason behind the nurse’s decisions (Black, 2014). This difficulty can be labeled tacit knowledge, which means that we know more than we can verbally state due to previous exposures or experiences. Tacit knowledge is very similar to intuition, but without the negative connotation intuition holds (Altmann,
Benner’s Five Stages
Stage 1 – The Novice Benner’s Novice stage primarily applies to students when they first begin nursing school (Black, 2014). In this stage, nurses have very little to no …show more content…
The progression between being a proficient nurse and an expert is much less clear-cut than the progression between any of the other stages. During this stage, the expert nurse focuses on the details of the problem without looking at the extraneous information (Murphy, 2012). He/she has become very flexible with high levels of problem solving, and is no longer conscious to his/her decision making process (Lyneham, Parkinson, & Denholm, 2008). There is significantly more automaticity in this stage, making it difficult to state the reason behind the nurse’s decisions (Black, 2014). This difficulty can be labeled tacit knowledge, which means that we know more than we can verbally state due to previous exposures or experiences. Tacit knowledge is very similar to intuition, but without the negative connotation intuition holds (Altmann,