Brochure Statement
Benner Associates
1968 Yosemite Road
Berkeley, California 94707
(510) 527-6448 FAX (510) 527-6448
E-Mail: bennerassoc@earthlink.net
Enhancing Nursing Excellence
in a Time of Change and Cost-Containment
- Identify Strengths and Impediments to Practice
- Identify Skilled Nursing Practice
- Make Visible the Best of Nursing Practice
- Renew Clinical Nurses in Discovering the Strengths of their Practice
- Promote Based on the Level of Nursing Practice Skill
- Share Clinical Knowledge Among Nursing Staff
- Build a Managerial Focus on Developing the Strengths of Practice
- Develop a Culture of Professional Quality and Excellence
The Problem:
Highly skilled nursing practice is often unrecognized by nurses and managers, alike, and by those making decisions about the number of R.N.'s available for patient care. In a hospital environment where acutely ill patients need the highest quality nursing care, concrete strategies are needed to make visible and enhance the highest quality in clinical nursing expertise. In the current health care climate, astute clinical judgment and expert caring practices have never been more important for quality health outcomes. Developing critical paths and case management methods do not guarantee the availability of clinical nursing expertise to deliver cost-effective and reliable quality patient care.
Sources of Solutions:
- Make quality nursing practice visible to all areas in the hospital.
- Promote, recognize and reward based on skilled nursing practice performance.
- Move the environment and culture of the nursing staff to focus on identifying recurring patient problems and strategies for improving patient care outcomes.
- Identify the best of the nursing clinical practice as sources of clinical knowledge and models providing concrete strategies for increasing expert clinical and ethical judgment.
- Help nurses at all levels to see their own practice and have the methods to share their clinical knowledge with their peers.
- Gain an understanding of the strengths and issues of nursing practice in the hospital.
- Support nursing unit managers in their role of developing nurses in their practice.
- Provide staff nurses with the authority, knowledge and accountability to determine nurses ready for promotion based on practice level skills.
Based on over 17 years of continuing research on nursing practice and skill acquisition, Benner Associates brings to hospitals and their nursing divisions, a plan and process to put in place a set of solutions to many of the problems facing nursing in the current environment.
Working through the renewal of the clinical practice development and promotion system in the hospital, this approach and methodology focuses on nursing practice and on recognizing, rewarding, and enhancing the practice and the practitioner.
A team of consultants assists in creating a clinical practice development system, that moves beyond abstract descriptions or activities used to determine skill levels and helps create professional peer review procedures utilizing clinical narratives to identifying advanced nurse practice.
The consulting team works with nursing management and staff development, at all levels, particularly at the crucial unit level, to understand skill acquisition, stages of development of staff nurses, and the use of clinical narrative methodology to promote the development of clinical expertise. This approach helps management identify system problems across the hospital that impede advanced nursing practice.
Benner Associates provides support in creating clinical practice development and promotion systems and managerial growth. By focusing on nursing practice, skill levels are identified and the clinical knowledge of excellent practitioners is made visible, creating a culture of excellence.
Among the outcomes experienced by hospitals using this approach are:
- Increased recognition of excellent nursing practice by the professional community.
- Appreciation of one's level of knowledge and skill by the nurse and nurse peers.
- A means of sharing and growing the knowledge of the practice among nurses.
- The creation of a clinical track which retains and rewards expert nurses in patient care.
- The retention of nurses in the hospital who represent and model excellence in clinical practice.
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