Finally, the Department of Veteran Affairs has granted veterans direct access to advanced practice registered nurses. It used to be that nurse practitioners were under the direction of a physician. However, now in the entire VA system, nurse practitioners can practice independently. This will give veterans increased access to care and decrease the long wait times that they have been experiencing. There are over 200,000 nurse practitioners in the country; 5,000 who work in the VA system. … [Read more...]
Do You Know What Medical Malpractice Is?
Negligence is a civil wrong of which medical malpractice itself is a form. There are 4 elements to negligence: duty, breach, cause and harm. In order to have a claim for negligence, all 4 of these elements must be present. Let’s first look at negligence in a context outside of health care. Imagine you’re driving along and approach a stop sign. You have a “duty” to come to stop at the sign. If you go into the intersection without stopping, you have committed a “breach” of your … [Read more...]
The Domino Effect
Would you believe that if you have a license, which is expired, the Board can still take action on that license? Unfortunately, many nurses find out the hard way that this is the case. The idea is that, like a driver’s license, if your license gets suspended in one state, they don’t want you driving in another state. Here, they don’t want you to reapply to get your license back. In addition, the Board feels that the public has a right to know if there is a problem. If you have an … [Read more...]
Charting by Exception
I often tell people that I was practicing nursing back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth! We didn’t have computers then and we didn’t have charting by exception. We only had what we would write down in the paper chart medical record. While progress in technology has since made documentation so much easier, these advances may not always be in the nurse’s best interest. When all you need to do is check the boxes to record how the patient is doing, it’s hard to make sure that A + B … [Read more...]
Documentation Will Save You Every Time
I recently was involved in a medical malpractice trial in which the nurses’ documentation was at issue. Or perhaps more appropriately would be to say it was the nurses’ lack of documentation. Sometimes we get so busy with our work, but documentation is the only thing that may save you if there is a medical malpractice action. Many States have a statute of limitations which is a timeframe setting up a deadline for when a lawsuit can be filed. Here, in Indiana, that statute limitation is 2 … [Read more...]
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