Patricia Benner Benner in Las Vegas

January 13, 2025 -- Today was the first day of the Educating Nurses: A Radical Transformation 2025 Conference in Las Vegas, sponsored by HealthImpact, founded by one of my heroes, Patricia Benner of whom I have blogged previously.

Dr. Benner did not disappoint. Indeed, hers was the best of the many fine presentations. Here are some of the points she made that stuck with me.

  • The conference title calls for radical transformation and so did Benner. She decried the shortcomings of nursing as it's traditionally taught. For example, we are exhorted to make our practice evidence-based. Evidence is largely clinical trials. Yet these do not consider the comorbidities nurses see in patients in real life. Thus, in practical terms, the evidence offers little guidance for nursing practice.

  • Much of the humanity nurses bring to their work and for which they are lauded she described as existential resuscitation:
    ...preserving personhood in the face of suffering, disfigurement, institutionalization.
    Benner's patient-centered humanity continues to inform her work.

  • How do nurses learn to be nurses? She describes a variety of learning processes. An essential one is storytelling. This is one of the most effective ways people teach each other. Benner's presentation was replete with tales from the bedside. She not only preaches storytelling, she does it. And it works.

  • Another essential part of the learning process is students teaching one another. Not in the classroom -- that would be a cop-out by the instructor -- but on the job (or in the clinical). She calls this a community of learning and observes that it is underappreciated in conventional nursing education. In my own clinical rotations, I recall much help from others in my cohort (and of course I would provide it to them when I could) that got me through some challenging situations: "Yes, I had something like that with one of my patients and here's what I did that worked..."

  • Benner distinguished between clinical reasoning and the less valuable critical thinking that is so often touted by nursing educators. Only the former implies responsibility for the patient's outcome. Ultimately, only the outcome matters.

I got her autograph and took a lot of photos.

Excellent conference! Go HealthImpact! Go Dr. Benner!