Discovering that you are under investigation by your state nursing board can be one of your worst days in nursing practice. You likely know already that state nursing board disciplinary charges may result in suspension or revocation of your nursing license. Discipline could cost you a rewarding nursing job, practice, and career for which you worked hard and in which you have invested much. Investigation, though, is only the first step in a misconduct case. If you promptly retain the LLF National Law Firm’s premier Professional License Defense Team when learning of your investigation, we may be able to help you head off disciplinary charges. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now to retain our highly qualified attorneys to defend your investigation. You need our skilled and experienced license defense counsel during the investigation, for your best licensing outcome.
State Nursing Board Investigatory Authority
Make no mistake: your state nursing board has substantial statutory authority to undertake your investigation on allegations of your nursing unfitness, incompetence, or misconduct. Your state nurse practice act constitutes your state nursing board for the express purpose of protecting patients and the public. Your state nursing board does so by investigating and disciplining its licensed nurses. See, for example, the Georgia Nurse Practice Act, creating the Georgia Board of Nursing and granting it the authority to investigate and discipline its licensed nurses. The Georgia Nurse Practice Act, like other nurse practice acts across the nation, repeatedly authorizes the Board of Nursing to investigate new applicants, renewal applicants, and current licensees under any and all circumstances, on the complaints of others or of its own accord. Don’t question your state nursing board’s authority, intent, and resources to investigate. Instead, get our help defending the investigation.
State Nursing Board Investigators
Let us count the ways that state nursing boards investigate. Under the above authority, state nursing boards retain, train, and deploy skilled investigators. In more populous states like California, the state nursing board employs its own investigators, even organizing them into regional offices spread around the state. In less populous states like Montana, the state nursing board may rely on a centralized disciplinary investigation unit for all or many licensed professionals. In either case, those investigators are likely to be devoted full-time to their investigatory duties. The investigator who contacts you is likely to have substantial experience inducing nurses under investigation to admit to wrongs when they don’t intend to do so. Your investigator may know how to trick you into forgoing counsel or other rights, and giving frequent statements against your own interest when you are not informed of the allegations against you and are unprepared to speak knowledgeably about your own matter. Do not underestimate the skill and experience of your state nursing board investigator. Get our help to level the playing field.
State Nursing Board Investigation Means
State nursing boards also devote other substantial resources to investigation, beyond employing skilled and experienced investigators. The Georgia Nurse Practice Act already referenced above is again an example, authorizing Georgia Nursing Board investigators to issue subpoenas to compel witness testimony and attendance, pay witness fees and expenses of travel, obtain fingerprints and other biometric information for background searches, use the results of background searches, and report your investigation results to the nationally coordinated nurse licensure system. The Georgia Nurse Practice Act further authorizes the Board of Nursing to recover the costs of investigation from the accused nurse in the disciplinary proceeding. You can expect your state board investigator to contact and interview witnesses, obtain medical records, personnel files, dispensary records, and other work records, search court case files, and get the assistance of law enforcement, social services, and other federal, state, and local agency personnel. Don’t underestimate your state nursing board’s investigatory resources. Instead, get our defense help.
Perils of Going Without a Lawyer During Investigation
The choice whether to have our skilled and experienced representation during your investigation or to go without a lawyer is your choice. You need our representation for your best outcome, but nothing absolutely requires you to have a lawyer. Yet, understand the significant risks you face when going without a lawyer during a state nursing board investigation, as the following subparagraphs describe.
The Risk of Inadvertent Misstatements
The first risk you face without our representation is that you will inadvertently misstate and misrepresent facts relevant to the proceeding, leading to additional disciplinary charges for obstructing the investigation. As already noted above, your state board investigator knows how to disarm the accused nurse. Your state board investigator does not need to read you any Miranda warnings. Anything you say, the investigator may and will use against you. The investigator won’t necessarily give you any notice of the investigator’s appearance at your workplace and may instead just show up and start asking you questions.
The Risk of Uninformed Statements
The second risk that you face without our representation is that the statements you make to the investigator will be uninformed by documents and other information that is or should be available to you before you give statements. You should not answer questions until you know what the allegations against you involve. You should not answer questions until you have had a chance to review the medical records, work records, or other information that you created or on which you relied in the matter, to refresh your recollection. Just talking off the cuff won’t help. You may instead inadvertently contradict what you already recorded in documents available to the investigator, making it appear as if you are lying to conceal the alleged misconduct.
The Risk of Multiple Inconsistent Statements
The next risk you face without our representation is that the investigator will induce you into giving multiple statements at different times on the same matter, and that your statements will have inconsistencies that make it appear as if you are dissembling to conceal your responsibility in the matter. Getting multiple statements from an accused at different times under different circumstances, with different questions and prompts, is the oldest trick in the investigator’s book. Don’t let that happen to you. Instead, let us coordinate a single interview with the investigator at a time when you are fully prepared to give accurate, honest, and complete answers.
The Risk of Incomplete Disclosures
The next risk that you face without our representation is that you will make incomplete disclosures to the investigator, making it appear that your omissions are intentional attempts to mislead the investigator. For instance, if the investigator requests your complete records, and you inadvertently omit one or more records, the investigator may later discover those records and accuse you of purposeful concealment. Our attorneys can help you prepare complete responses to document requests and provide complete answers to other requests. Don’t fall into investigative traps. Instead, get our help responding properly to your investigation.
What You Have at Risk in a Board Investigation
To fully appreciate why you need our skilled and experienced representation during your state nursing board investigation, you should understand, too, what you have at risk in a state nursing board disciplinary investigation. You doubtless worked hard and invested much in your nursing education and licensure. You’ve also worked to build up your nursing practice and the confidence of your patients, colleagues, supervisors, facility personnel, and employer. You didn’t build your professional reputation, network, and practice only to lose it all to disciplinary charges. But that’s the loss that disciplinary investigation threatens. Your state nursing board investigator doesn’t even have to find any unfitness, impairment, or incompetence during the investigation. The investigator may only need to trick you into a misstatement or innocent omission, to then charge that you failed to cooperate in the proceeding and instead obstructed justice.
Critical Investigation Role of Our Defense Attorney
In that setting, our attorneys play a critical role in your investigation. The investigation is when the state nursing board casts the die for your disciplinary outcome. Once the investigator gathers the information and evidence, and reduces everything to an investigation report and recommendation for the state nursing board, turning that ship around can be hard. But when you retain us to respond to the investigation, we can supply the investigator with your defense information and evidence, evidence of your good character, and evidence of your remedial measures mitigating the need for any sanction. We can, in other words, move your entire defense from the back end, at the board hearing, to the front end, at the preliminary investigation stage. We may thus be able to short-circuit your disciplinary process, resolving it even before the state board issues disciplinary charges.
Avoid Collateral Impacts to Disciplinary Investigation
Your goal in a state nursing board disciplinary matter is to avoid any state nursing board action that besmirches your good record and places you at risk of employment termination. A disciplinary record can have severe collateral impacts. Even if you don’t lose your license to suspension or revocation, your employer may terminate your employment because of the liability, regulatory, and reputational risks that accompany employing a nurse under license reprimand or probation. If you lose your nursing job, you can imagine the financial and relational losses that could go with that loss of income. The best way to avoid these collateral impacts is to head off the disciplinary process with a thorough, accurate, truthful, and effective response to the allegations during the investigation. Don’t sit back and wait, without our representation, while the investigator casts the die against you in a condemning investigation report. Instead, let us help you resolve your disciplinary matter during the investigation, when the proceeding has its least risk and impact.
Specific Acts We Perform During Investigation
You can see from the above discussion how effective our appearance on your behalf during the investigation can be. Here is a summary of just a few of the many specific steps our attorneys can take during an investigation to aid your defense, in an effort to head off any disciplinary charges:
- identify the investigator through our contacts with the state nursing board, as soon as you learn from others of your investigation;
- notify the state nursing board and its investigator of our appearance on your behalf, requiring the board and investigator to communicate with you through us rather than solely with you, directly;
- learn from the investigator and state board the nature and details of the complaint against you, including any evidence supporting that complaint;
- share with you the details of the complaint, while helping you identify, recover, and preserve all evidence, including electronically stored information that may be relevant to the complaint’s resolution;
- help you identify witnesses who have relevant exonerating or mitigating evidence or information, and get that information from them to share with the investigator;
- help you respond to the investigator’s document requests with your complete and accurate documentation, retaining the originals for safekeeping;
- help you recover medical records, work records, and other documents in the investigator’s possession or the possession of third parties, to help you refresh your recollection as to events;
- present you for an interview on a single occasion when you are fully prepared and informed to answer accurately;
- help you discern, plan, and complete remedial measures addressing any potential board concerns reflected in the disciplinary complaint and investigation; and
- advocate and negotiate for voluntary abandonment and dismissal of the complaint during the investigation stage, to spare you a lengthy disciplinary proceeding.
Premier Nurse License Defense
If you just received notice that you are under investigation by your state nursing board, your best move is to retain the LLF National Law Firm’s premier Professional License Defense Team to assist you with the investigation. We have successfully helped hundreds of nurses and other professionals through disciplinary investigations and proceedings of all kinds. Our attorneys are available to represent you nationwide. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now for our highly qualified license defense representation.