Nursing practice in Arkansas can be especially enjoyable and rewarding for a nurse employed by a staffing agency. The state's natural beauty, good roads, safe communities, and favorable climate can make an agency nurse's statewide travel especially conducive for meaningful nursing care. The state's many fine healthcare facilities contribute to the opportunities. But misconduct allegations, to which agency nurses are especially vulnerable, put all that at risk. Our attorneys represent agency nurses defending misconduct allegations in Little Rock, Fayetteville, Fort Smith, Springdale, Jonesboro, Rogers, Conway, North Little Rock, Bentonville, Pine Bluff, Hot Springs, Benton, and all other Arkansas locations, whether you work for Gifted Healthcare, TNAA, AMN Healthcare, Aureus Medical Group, TravelMax Nursing, CompHealth, Apex Staffing, or any other Arkansas nurse staffing agency. Retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Professional License Defense Team for your agency nurse defense. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now.
Advantages to Arkansas Staffing Agency Nurse Employment
Engaging in nursing practice through a staffing agency can be a boon to a rewarding nursing career. Beginning, continuing, or resuming your nursing practice through a staffing agency can let you test the waters. You may be able to take nursing assignments in a variety of communities, facilities, and fields until you find your preferred long-term employment opportunity. You may alternatively just like moving around, getting to know new communities, having new professional colleagues, and learning new skills through new assignments in different nursing fields. Staffing agency nursing can also protect you against the vagaries of institutional assignments, where nurses can lose jobs for no fault of their own, as healthcare facilities change programs or endure economic ups and downs. Whatever the reason you chose staffing agency employment for your nursing career, value that opportunity. Don't throw it away to disciplinary charges. Get our help.
Challenges to Arkansas Staffing Agency Nursing Assignments
Staffing agency employment, though, also has its own challenges. It's not all rewards. Healthcare facilities, like other employers, can value their direct employees over the workers they employ through staffing agencies, regarding them as “temporary” workers even when at the facility long term. Agency nurses can, as a result, get overlooked. They can also get undervalued. Agency nurses can be the first to go when the healthcare facility needs or wants labor cutbacks. And agency nurses can be the first a healthcare facility blames for nursing errors or problems.
The healthcare facility in which your staffing agency has placed may have procedures available not only to its direct employees but also to you, its “temporary” employee, to dispute allegations of misconduct. But then again, it may not. Your assigned healthcare facility may refuse to give you any chance to contradict, defend, and defeat the misconduct allegations, or even to explain your own conduct. The healthcare facility may regard that question as your staffing agency's problem. Our attorneys can help you advocate with your healthcare facility against misconduct allegations. Don't overlook that possibility. Cut off the allegations at their source, if you can. But don't be surprised if your healthcare facility instead simply terminates your assignment.
Challenges to Arkansas Staffing Agency Nurse Employment
Your staffing agency may not simply take you back to reassign you to another one of its healthcare facility clients, if your current healthcare facility terminates your assignment over misconduct allegations. Your staffing agency may value you highly. It may have other healthcare facilities in desperate need of your nursing services. But your staffing agency may instead believe that assigning you to another healthcare facility will risk offending that facility if and when it finds out that another facility terminated your assignment due to misconduct allegations. Your staffing agency may give you the opportunity to fight the misconduct allegations within some form of employment review within the agency. If so, let us help you make that showing that you deserve for the staffing agency to continue your employment. If your staffing agency instead terminates your employment over misconduct allegations, you may find it very hard to locate another staffing agency or healthcare facility to employ you for nursing services. Fight the charges up front if you can, and let us help you do so effectively, for your best outcome.
Arkansas State Board of Nursing Disciplinary Charges
The Arkansas State Board of Nursing licenses nurses practicing in the state. The State Board licenses not only registered nurses (RNs) and licensed practical nurses (LPNs) but also nurse midwives, registered nurse practitioners (RPNs), and advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs). The first section of the Arkansas Nurse Practice Act provides that you may not practice nursing in Arkansas without a current license in good standing. The second subchapter of the Nurse Practice Act creates the State Board of Nursing and empowers it to establish and enforce license standards, including by disciplining nurses who fail to meet those standards. The Act's third subchapter authorizes the rules and procedures for disciplining nurses, including agency nurses.
Arkansas State Board of Nursing Disciplinary Impacts
When you face Arkansas State Board of Nursing disciplinary charges, everything for which you worked as an agency nurse is at risk. Your nursing education, job, career, reputation, and future may all be worthless, depending on the outcome of those disciplinary charges. You could lose your job, job benefits, professional network, professional standing, and everything else that depends on your nursing employment. Don't ignore or underestimate those impacts. Value your nursing education, licensure, employment, and career properly, assigning it the worth that you know it provides to you, your family, your patients, and your community. Don't attempt to represent yourself in defense of those charges. The proceedings can be complex, confusing, and contentious, requiring strategic skills and experience that neither you nor local unqualified criminal defense, estate planning, family law, and business law attorneys have. When you retain our Professional License Defense Team, you get the skills and experience you need for your best disciplinary outcome.
Arkansas Agency Nurse Disciplinary Sanctions
The third subchapter of the Arkansas Nurse Practice Act authorizes the State Board of Nursing to “deny, suspend, revoke, or limit any license or privilege to practice nursing … or to otherwise discipline a licensee” as disciplinary sanction. Discipline is not automatic. The State Board must follow its procedures to find misconduct before imposing any sanction. But once the State Board determines that you committed nursing misconduct as an agency nurse, the State Board can do pretty much whatever it wants with your license. In the alternative to license suspension, license revocation, or the refusal to provide or renew a license, the State Board may impose license reprimand or license probation, or limit your nursing license to only certain facilities, certain nursing services, shorter nursing hours, or supervised practice. The State Board may also require you to complete additional education and training, and to undergo evaluation and treatment for substance abuse, mental health issues, or medical conditions. Beware the breadth and burden of potential sanctions. Get our defense help.
Arkansas State Board of Nursing Disciplinary Actions
Do not expect your disciplinary action to remain confidential. Your nursing license discipline will be public, readily found online in searchable databases. The Arkansas State Board of Nursing publishes disciplinary actions including the name, license number, offense date, and offense type for disciplined nurses. Your staffing agency, healthcare facility, colleagues, prospective employers, family members, professional network, and friends will all be able to learn the facts and details of your misconduct. You may also have duties to report the discipline to other states in which you hold a nursing license, other employers, and any educational program in which you are participating. Beware any form of discipline. Let us help defend and defeat the charges.
Special Agency Nurse Impacts from Disciplinary Sanctions
Don't assume that minor or moderate discipline won't affect you, as an agency nurse. Even if you do not suffer license suspension or revocation, which promptly ends your ability to provide nursing services in the state and to earn a living from your staffing agency employment, and the State Board instead imposes lesser sanctions, you may still lose your healthcare facility assignment and staffing agency employment. Your staffing agency may have good reason not to risk continuing your current assignment or, if you've already lost that assignment due to the misconduct charges, giving you a new assignment. Your staffing agency may have its own rules not to employ disciplined nurses, to protect its own reputation and potential civil liability. Let us help you defend the charges so that you suffer no sanction, if possible. And if you do suffer a sanction, let us help you advocate with your staffing agency and placement for your retention.
Grounds for Arkansas Agency Nurse Discipline
To suffer discipline, your agency nurse practice must give the disciplinary officials the grounds to impose it. The third subchapter of the Arkansas Nurse Practice Act lists the several grounds on which the State Board of Nursing may impose a disciplinary sanction against you. Consider the following statutory grounds the Nurse Practice Act enumerates and how our attorneys may help you defend those charges.
Credentials Fraud as a Ground for Arkansas Agency Nurse Discipline
Credentials fraud, defined as “fraud or deceit in procuring or attempting to procure a license to practice nursing,” is the first ground for agency nurse discipline under the third subchapter of the Arkansas Nurse Practice Act. Credentials fraud can include cheating on the licensing exam, misrepresenting your education or nursing experience on your license application, concealing criminal convictions on your application or renewal form, and hiding discipline in other states. Because agency nurses have a more-complex employment relationship and history through their staffing agency, agency nurses can more easily make mistakes on their license application when disclosing work experience. Our attorneys may be able to help defend these charges by showing that your application or renewal form was accurate, you made no material misstatements, or any misstatements you made were either immaterial or innocent, without the knowledge and fraudulent intent necessary to establish the charge.
Crime or Immorality as a Ground for Arkansas Agency Nurse Discipline
Guilt of “a crime or gross immorality” is the second ground for agency nurse discipline under the third subchapter of the Arkansas Nurse Practice Act. The Act does not name the crimes or define the gross immorality that may subject a nurse to discipline. Nor does the Act restrict the crimes or gross immorality to having some relationship to nursing practice. Typical disqualifying crimes, though, include homicide, assault, aggravated assault, sexual assault, and other crimes of violence, theft, embezzlement, criminal fraud, and other crimes of dishonesty, and indecent exposure, child pornography, and other crimes of moral turpitude. Our attorneys may be able to help defend these charges by showing that you did not commit the alleged crime, that the criminal court reversed or expunged your conviction, the governor pardoned your conviction, or the conviction was not for a disqualifying crime affecting your fitness to practice nursing competently and safely.
Substandard Practice as Grounds for Arkansas Agency Nurse Discipline
Substandard practice, defined as being “unfit or incompetent by reason of negligence, habits, or other causes,” is another ground for discipline under the third subchapter of the Arkansas Nurse Practice Act. Unfitness or incompetence may include disregarding physician orders, failing to accurately observe and document patient conditions and services provided, failing to alert physicians or other emergency medical personnel to a sudden deterioration in a patient's condition, unsafe lifting and transfer practices, and medication errors. Agency nurses may more commonly face these sorts of allegations when scapegoated for errors or omissions by others or when the facility's practices differ from commonly accepted nursing practice. Our attorneys may be able to help defend these charges by showing that your practice met minimum nursing standards, others were responsible for the alleged lapses, or that you provided services according to reasonable instructions of a physician or nurse supervisor.
Impaired Practice as a Ground for Arkansas Agency Nurse Discipline
Intoxicated or impaired practice, defined as when the nurse is “habitually intemperate or is addicted to the use of habit-forming drugs,” or “mental incompetence,” are other grounds for discipline under the third subchapter of the Arkansas Nurse Practice Act. Agency nurses may more commonly face these allegations when the facility's staff does not recognize your innocent mental or medical condition and mistakes it for alcohol or drug abuse or mental illness. Our attorneys may be able to help defend these charges by showing that you never practiced while intoxicated or impaired, your appearance of intoxicated or impaired practice was due to medication changes or other innocent conditions, or you promptly corrected any impaired practice under circumstances where a repeat is unlikely.
Unprofessional Conduct as a Ground for Arkansas Agency Nurse Discipline
Unprofessional conduct is another ground for discipline under the third subchapter of the Arkansas Nurse Practice Act. Unprofessional conduct is an extremely broad and vague category that healthcare facilities may invoke to address personality conflicts and morale or management issues, or when scapegoating staff for other institutional failures. Unprofessional conduct may involve insubordination toward superiors, disrespect of colleagues, and mistreatment of subordinate staff. It may also involve dress, hygiene, or demeanor issues, including unkempt appearance or use of profanity. But it may also include more-serious wrongs such as theft, endangerment, disruption, records falsification, billing fraud, or even patient abuse or neglect. Agency nurses may face unprofessional conduct charges when unfamiliar with the facility's customs and conventions, or when facility staff wish to use vague allegations to terminate your assignment for personal reasons. Our attorneys may be able to help defend these charges by showing that you did not commit the alleged unprofessional conduct, you were blamed for conduct others committed, or the complaining witness was confused as to your identity, deluded as to your actions, or retaliating unfairly against you.
Procedures for Arkansas Agency Nurse Discipline
The third subchapter of the Arkansas Nurse Practice Act provides that the State Board of Nursing must follow the protective procedures offered under the state's Administrative Procedure Act, when pursuing disciplinary charges against agency nurses and other nurses. The Arkansas Administrative Procedure Act, addressing and satisfying your constitutional due process rights, provides for contested hearings before independent administrative law judges (ALJs). An ALJ generally has some familiarity with the standards in the profession over which the ALJ has authority to decide disciplinary cases. When you retain us to invoke your Administrative Procedure Act rights, you should get an impartial and reasonably experienced decision maker, who is ready, willing, and able to provide you with all of your protective procedural rights. We should be able to help you invoke the following protective procedures for your best outcome to disciplinary charges:
- that the State Board would provide you with a detailed description of the charges, disclosing the evidence on which the State Board will rely to establish those charges;
- that the proceeding with authorize discovery of other evidence held by non-parties to the proceeding, including by subpoena for documents or testimony;
- that you would have the right to attend a formal hearing before the ALJ at which witnesses must appear under oath and subject to cross-examination, if the ALJ is to consider their testimony;
- that you would have the right to retain us to attend that formal hearing to conduct cross-examinations and present your own testimony, witnesses, and documentary evidence;
- that the ALJ would issue a written decision stating the facts and authority on which the ALJ relied for the decision, so that, with our help, you could review the decision for its implications and for any errors;
- that the State Board of Nursing would retain authority to review and accept or reverse the ALJ recommendation on an administrative appeal, enabling our attorneys to advocate before that body in your best interest; and
- that the state's courts would have limited authority to review the final agency determination, giving our attorneys another opportunity to advocate on your behalf before another decision maker.
Arkansas State Board of Nursing Alternative Discipline Program
The Arkansas State Board of Nursing maintains an alternative discipline program that encourages nurses with drug or alcohol abuse problems or addictions to access assessment and treatment services. The State Board calls the program the Arkansas Nurses Alternative Program (ArNAP). Disciplinary officials may offer to accept your ArNAP enrollment in lieu of pursuing disciplinary charges, although likely only if the charges involve impaired or intoxicated practice without related abuse, neglect, malpractice, or unprofessional conduct. While alternative dispute programs can be beneficial in certain cases, you must beware of program offers that require you to relinquish your nursing license or to meet conditions that you may find difficult or impossible to satisfy. Program referral can, in other words, be a way to trick you into losing your license without a contested proceeding. Let us help you evaluate consent agreements of any kind, including ones involving ArNAP referral.
Defending Arkansas Agency Nurse Misconduct Charges
If you have gleaned nothing else from the above discussion, you should by now recognize that it may well be possible for you to defend your Arkansas State Board of Nursing disciplinary charges or even head off disciplinary charges before the allegations reach disciplinary officials. But those possibilities may only exist with our skilled and experienced representation. You likely lack the legal and administrative knowledge and strategic advocacy skills for your best possible outcome. And do not expect local lawyers to necessarily possess the administrative skills and experience with professional license defense for your effective representation. Instead, retain our Professional License Defense Team to communicate, negotiate, and advocate with disciplinary officials and personnel at your healthcare facility and staffing agency employer.
Premier Agency Nurse Defense in Arkansas
If you are an agency nurse facing misconduct allegations in Little Rock, Fayetteville, Fort Smith, Springdale, Jonesboro, Rogers, Conway, North Little Rock, Bentonville, Pine Bluff, Hot Springs, Benton, or any other Arkansas location, retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Professional License Defense Team for your best defense. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now.
