8 EXPERTISE IN NURSING High demand for nurses to give quality and standard care has led to an increase in innovative nursing practice. How can these standards and innovations be maintained progressively to meet the dynamics in health care? .The only way is to continue to develop nurses knowledge and skills to the point where they become experts. According to Patricia Benner a nurse theorist, it is by the nurse practitioner gaining experience to the point where they become experts. Experience is one of the attributes that helps the profession to grow and knowledge is developed.
The concept of expertise in nursing is drawn from the theory of skills acquisition. It posits that nursing skills can only be developed through situational experience that are acquired during the years of practice. An individual acquires skills through five levels of proficiency: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert. The learner moves from a proficiency of novice to expert, where the NOVICE acquire skill by depending on abstract knowledge to work to a dependency on concrete experience. The nurse moves from being an observer of a situation to a nurse who is involved in the performance of that skill. The novice is a beginner that has no experience in the situation that they are required to
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That is one reason why most patients request and look out for expert nurses in clinical area. They confide in them because those nurses because they feel that they will get the best advice concerning their management. Patients who come to the clinical area observe what the nurses do, their attitude and clinical expertise and use theses to identify those nurses who have the expertise. Outside of the nurse’s expertise, patients also seek those nurses who have more interpersonal qualities like compassion, smiles and warmth. Therefore expert nurses should be humane while handling