Helpful Tips on Becoming a Legal Nurse Consultant

Helpful Tips on Becoming a Legal Nurse Consultant

Out of the approximately 1,162,124 lawyers in practice today, 25 percent of them deal with medical malpractice and similar personal injury lawsuits. For these, lawyers need the assistance of a legal nurse consultant. A legal nurse consultant is a registered or licensed nurse who uses his or her skills and knowledge as a healthcare provider for consultation purposes on medically relevant legal cases. LNCs assist lawyers in examining medical records and understanding medical terminologies, jargons and medical procedures to determine the best step for the legal case. The lawyer and the legal nurse consultant will work hand in hand for the betterment of the case.

Legal nurse consultants can practice their profession throughout in both rural and urban areas. Cases which LNCs deal with involve simple leg fracture caused by a car accident to high profile medical cases like medical malpractice and more.

The consultants have the choice of working independently from their homes for attorneys, either on a part-time or full time basis. Others render their service to give consultations to government agencies, insurance companies, and private corporations.

So what does a nurse need to possess or to know in order to become a legal nurse consultant?
A consultant must possess qualities such as dedication to their work as well as persistence. One should be capable of accurately interpreting the medical situations and be able to read the medical record properly.

To make things clear, listed here are some of the functions performed by the legal nurse consultant:

• They review the case for its merit
• Help the attorney-client by interpreting medical jargons and records while explaining the technical nursing terminologies, plans as well as treatment for diagnosed diseases.

• LNCs perform research on related literatures which are applicable the specific situations and present it as a simplified paper
• Legal nurse consultants are responsible for reviewing, analysis and summarization of depositions
• They prepare for the deposition and preparation for the trial
• LNCs also attend case trials as well as hearings in court
• They assist witnesses for the case

For those professionals who practice as legal nurse consultant only, there are no specified specialty areas and the cases which they will handle involve all field of medicine. They will accept and review all types of cases and if one feels not confident enough to handle a case, sub-contracting can be an option and not to refuse a case because of little or no clinical experience in the area in question.

There are trainings involved in becoming a legal nurse consultant and these areas are focused on nursing standards, clinical nursing and medicine which link medical law but the “Law” is not the domain of the legal nurse consultant and so, understanding only the essentials is necessary.
Here is a brief list of clients that benefit from the services of Legal Nurse Consultants:

• Attorneys
• Insurance companies for adjudicating claims
• The Healthcare facilities
• Government agencies and private corporations (consulted in risk identification and management, forming strategies for the development of corporate quality assurance, valuation and the minimizing of a company’s loss exposure)

The conclusion is, any registered nurse who would like to become a legal nurse consultant should train on how to become one and should persevere because this profession is not that easy. It takes a lot of hard work to become successful in this field and so with other endeavors.