The work of Patricia Benner, based on over 25 years of research on nursing practice, clinical development, skill acquisition and healthcare ethics, is directed to helping nurses understand and develop their practice. Based on this research, 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. This approach and methodology focuses on nursing practice and on recognizing, rewarding, and enhancing the practice and the practitioner by renewing the clinical practice development system in the hospital.

In our highly changing health care environment, the core of the hospital is patient care and the core of the core is the practice of the nurses who are with patients on a 24 hour basis. Especially during this time of lean financial resources and nursing shortage, the key question is whether, in this era of highly acute patients, there are nurses who have an excellence of practice that can directly affect how a patient progresses to discharge and reduce unnecessary complications and recidivism. Given these demands, it is important that nurses have a sense of the skill and knowledge they have as well as an opportunity to recover the significance of their own practice for their development and for their retention in hospitals and in nursing.