¶ … skills development and levels of knowledge acquisition based on clinical experience. Nurses move from novice making decisions based on rules to expert who are able to see connections between actions and outcomes using critical thinking Some claim that expert nursing comes from habituation in making decisions. Benner (2001), for instance, posits 5 different levels of development that the nurse moves through: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert. Each one builds on the other as the nurse uses the reflection gained from her experience to improve her practice. Each of these five different levels constitute proficiency and skill not only in practical labor, but also in other components -- such as skilled communication and mentoring -- that are integral to the field of nursing. The novice nurse, for instance, tends to see the patient as an object made up of discrete pieces of information / data and specific tasks that she, the nurse, has to master....

The expert nurse, however, on the top of the rung, can move beyond that approaching her task in a more automatic fashion and seeing the patient as an individual who is worthy of and requires her full respect. At the same time, the expert nurse can effortlessly and diligently move through her tasks without being caught up in the technical details. The expert is able to transcend the tasks and patient to read the whole picture, but she ignores nothing else whilst doing so. Benner's thesis rests on regularity and repetition of skill.
It seems to me, however, that skilled nursing is made up too of critical thinking and that without critical thinking repetition of task not only falls flat but, actually, can be dangerous. It needs cautious and clever repetition of task to transform the novitiate to an expert.

evidence-based practice (EB) is very much a part of responsible nursing and EBP, according to Sackett (2009) is linked to five main ideas. These five…