When people find out I am a nurse the first question is always, “What hospital do you work for?”  After I tell them I do not work for a hospital, it is usually followed by “Oh, what doctor do you work for?”  I then explain that I don’t work for a doctor, clinic or hospital, but rather I own a consulting firm.  “But I thought you were a nurse.”  Yes, I am STILL a nurse.

So you may be asking, “What exactly is a nurse consultant and what do they do?”  There are a variety of nurse consultants.  In my business we provide a variety of consulting services such as legal work, life care planning, case management and more.  I will address some of these different types of consulting in the coming posts, but first we will discuss legal nurse consulting.

The practice of legal nurse consulting began about 20 years ago as a way to assist others in understanding medical events within the legal practice.  Attorneys had previously used experts from various disciplines to support their cases.  Attorneys began to learn the value of what the nurse brought to the table.  The contributions to case development that nurses provide is a result of their collaborative experiences in healthcare. The legal nurse consultant is not a paralegal.  A legal nurse consultant’s value does not comes from a legal education but from his or her experience as a nurse and member of the healthcare team.  In certain practices a legal nurse might assume some of the duties of a paralegal.  Most importantly, the legal nurse consultant has been designated as a specialty area of nursing practice.  Those with the LNCC designation have met the rigorous requirements for certification and provide valuable information and insight to the beginning LNC. Also seek consultants who are associated with the American Association of Legal Nurse Consultants (AALNC); the professional association of legal nurses.

*The role of the legal nurse consultant in practice includes many facets – and multiple benefits to the client. These include, but may not be limited to:

• Letters to request medical records
• Tracking for accurate medical record keeping
• Define missing medical records
• Review any case where injury is at question
• Define the medical issues in a case
• Create a list of all parties involved in the case
• Generate research based reports
• Analyze and Define future medical needs of the injured client
• Analyze and Define medical issues in the case
• Analyze and Project future medical cost needs of a client
• Prepare the expert witness
• Recommend cost saving techniques for the attorney and client
• Define cost savings
• Work within a budget provided
• Identify testifying experts needed in a medical case
• Find and interview expert witnesses
• Research like-cases for the attorney client
• Attend Independent Medical Exams
• Provide recommendations for client safety questions
• Paginate and tab the medical file
• Provide demonstrative evidence in timelines and pictures for the client
• Generate a detailed chronology of the case
• Generate a meritorious based report
• Generate timelines of events
• Define the medical issues
• Educate the attorney client in the disease or the disease process
• Assess issues of causation · Assess issues of medical damages
• Create a medication list and their potential side effects
• Provide attorney support during depositions, discovery,trial and mediation
• Build the attorney client library with meritorious research
• Provide medical research regarding the disease and the disease process
• Assist in the production of interrogatories
• Assist the attorney in the development of case strategy
• Prepare the medical case for trial proceedings
• Provide current standards of care, policies and procedures in medical issues and define the appropriate testifying expert to speak to the issues
• Recommend Medicare Set Aside Allocations when appropriate, and Life Care Planning when appropriate
• Reviews a case for merit and provides recommendations to the attorney (in no way does this include the practice of law- the attorney client provides the final decision)
• The legal nurse consultant can explain and teach the medical record. She is a medical record expert. She can define and teach the client the meaning of all abbreviations within the medical case and provide explanation of the meaning of all acronyms
• Teaches the administration procedures and structure of the hospital, medical facility, nursing home, or other clinic setting to the attorney
• Consults with external persons to obtain a deeper understanding of the possible needs of the case i.e.; billing and coding,diagnosis and treatment needs, testifying expert needs
• Understands and keeps complete confidentiality with all cases in compliance with HIPAA
• The legal nurse consultant may provide testifying expert work, be a fact witness to the event, or complete work as an attorney product under confidentiality

The skills of the nurse as educator are among the most valuable in possession of the LNC. The LNC finds his or herself entrenched in the education of the attorney, legal support staff, and jury to assist in finding the truth and guiding them through the processes of discovery, mediation, and trial. I greatly enjoy my business as legal nurse consultant probably because I do greatly enjoy the education portion of my job as a nurse.  I work with both plaintiff and defense firms on all sorts of cases in which medical issues are of a concern.

*List created by The J.E.R.K. LNC (Juris Educational Resource Knowledge)