Recently I had an opportunity to review the Nursing Service Organization (NSO) Nurse Professional Liability Exposure 2015 Claim Report Update, which looked at claims regarding assessment and monitoring, treatment and care, chain-of-command and scope of practice. I always find these types of reviews to be so interesting. Several surprising things I noticed in this report included 23.9% of the claims involved agency nurses with the majority being from home care agencies. Another surprise was … [Read more...]
Victory For Nurse Practitioners
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...]
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