For nurses facing state board disciplinary investigation, obtaining copies first of the disciplinary complaint and then of the investigation report can be critical steps in an effective defense. Your best move to get the complaint and investigation report is to retain the LLF National Law Firm’s premier Professional License Defense Team. Our attorneys have the knowledge, skill, and experience to invoke the necessary law, rule, and regulations for this important procedural relief. We also have the national reputation and relationships among state nursing board officials to gain their trust, confidence, and cooperation. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now for the representation you need for your effective defense, including obtaining the complaint and investigation report.
State Nursing Board Authority
State nursing board officials don’t have unrestricted authority to investigate complaints against nurses, but they do have substantial authority. State nursing practice acts authorize state nursing boards to both license nurses and discipline their licenses. See, for example, the Utah Nurse Practice Act, authorizing the Utah Board of Nursing to license and discipline nurses. See also the Kansas Nurse Practice Act, authorizing the Kansas Board of Nursing to license and discipline nurses practicing in that state. Your state will have a similar nursing practice act authorizing your own state nursing board to investigate complaints against your license and impose discipline if it finds violations of nursing standards. Don’t dispute your board’s authority. Instead, retain us to level the playing field by securing the complaint against you and the investigation report.
Role of the Disciplinary Complaint
You have good reason to want a copy of the complaint against you. State nursing board administrative rules and practices typically require individuals who wish to complain about a nurse’s conduct to complete a complaint form disclosing both the complainant’s identity and the factual grounds for the complaint. See, for example, the Missouri Board of Nursing complaint forms and information, requiring either a paper or online complaint. State nursing boards typically make a preliminary review of the complaint for potential merit before assigning arguably meritorious complaints for investigation. Thus, the disciplinary complaint triggers and forms the basis for investigation, containing the allegations that the state board is investigating.
Right to the Disciplinary Complaint
You should thus generally have a right to see the complaint against you. Your state nursing board must offer you constitutional due process when threatening to suspend or revoke your nursing license, interfering with your property and liberty interest in your nursing practice. Due process means fair notice of the disciplinary charges and a fair hearing to present your defense to an impartial decision maker. Because the complaint contains the allegations against you, you should have a copy of the complaint so that you have fair notice of the charges, satisfying due process.
If, instead, the state board investigator can hide the proverbial ball from you, then the investigator may be able to trick you into making inadvertent and inaccurate admissions or omitting material information that might have formed a valid defense. You can’t fight an enemy that you can’t see. You can’t dispute a charge that you don’t know. The investigator may not offer you the disciplinary complaint. The investigator may even resist supplying it to you. But when you retain us, we can make credible demands on the investigator to obtain the disciplinary complaint before you submit to an interview or otherwise attempt to respond to allegations you don’t yet know.
Grounds for Withholding a Complaint
State board investigators and other disciplinary officials may assert various grounds for withholding a disciplinary complaint. They may, for instance, argue that public complaints only trigger investigations. A public complaint isn’t the formal disciplinary charge that the state nursing board may later issue after investigation. To the state nursing board, it may just be another, relatively unimportant, data point. Indeed, a public complaint from a patient, a patient’s family member, or other lay and relatively uninformed individual may contain gross inaccuracies that the state nursing board does not approve or endorse. State nursing board officials may also claim that the complaint contains private information, the disclosure of which may embarrass the complainant or even subject the complainant to retaliation from the accused nurse or others.
Our response would be that state nursing board investigations should not be “fishing expeditions” in which the investigator goes hunting for anything the investigator can find wrong in the accused nurse’s conduct, whether related or unrelated to a public complaint. The complaint at least forms the basis for the investigation, which should generally be restricted to that scope. Moreover, an accused nurse has no fair opportunity to respond to the investigation request, including document requests and interview questions, without knowing the subject the inquiries address. And the complaint is about the subject. We should, in most cases, be able to obtain the complaint. We may, though, have to provide your assurances that you will not disclose the complaint’s private information beyond your defense team. You should certainly also not retaliate against any complainant, at risk of facing obstruction charges and presumptive discipline.
Role of the Investigation Report
You should also generally have the right to review the investigation report. When a state nursing board official assigns an investigator, the investigator has the duty to gather evidence into an investigation report that the state nursing board can review to issue appropriate disciplinary charges. The investigator may well recommend exactly what charges to issue. If so, the board is reasonably likely to accept the investigator’s recommendation and pursue those charges. The investigator may include witness statements, document summaries, photographs or other images, and video recordings or summaries of video recordings, among any other available forms of evidence. The investigation report is thus also critical to the pursuit of the disciplinary charges. The state assistant attorney general or other state lawyer whom the board employs to pursue the charges may largely present the incriminating evidence contained in the investigation report.
Right to the Investigation Report
For all of those reasons just stated, your effective defense generally requires having the full investigation report with all its exhibits well in advance of the disciplinary hearing. You and our attorneys need that investigation report to prepare your defense at the hearing. For instance, we need to know who is testifying and what they will say, so that we can prepare for their cross-examination. Indeed, in a fully fair proceeding, we should get to see a preliminary draft of the investigation report to correct and supplement it with your evidence. Some state nursing boards provide for that preliminary review procedure, while other boards simply disclose the completed investigation report, with whatever inaccuracies and omissions it may contain.
Invoking Protective Procedures
You’ve seen above that your state nursing board must offer you constitutional due process when threatening to suspend or revoke your nursing license. You’ve also seen above that obtaining the disciplinary complaint and investigation report may well be within your due process rights, absent special circumstances. If the investigator nonetheless refuses to supply the complaint and report, our attorneys can invoke protective procedures to secure a copy of it. When a state nursing board commences a disciplinary proceeding in which you have retained us to appear, we can invoke the board’s prehearing procedures seeking discovery of the complaint and report. When the board designates the presiding hearing officer, we can petition the hearing officer for a copy of the complaint and report before the officer schedules a hearing.
If the board continues to refuse to provide the disciplinary complaint and investigation report, and your disciplinary hearing commences without their disclosure, we can make a record at the hearing of the board’s violation of your due process rights. If you fail to prevail at your hearing, we can then use the board’s violation of your due process rights to overturn the decision on appeal. A constitutional violation of this sort may further give us access to the federal courts under civil rights statutes, including damages relief. Let us pursue the protective procedures necessary to preserve your due process rights, including gaining disclosure of the complaint and report.
Order of Disclosure
One other way in which we may be able to obtain the disciplinary complaint at the outset of the investigation is to withhold your document response and refuse your interview until we have the complaint in hand. As indicated above, both you and our attorneys need that complaint to prepare your document response, ensuring its relevance without omissions, and to help you prepare for your interview, when fully informed on the issues. But don’t attempt to withhold documents or refuse your interview on your own, without our representation. Let us make the request with all due sensitivity to your duty to cooperate with the investigation. We won’t present the request for the complaint as a unilateral demand but instead as a point of procedural fairness.
Duty to Cooperate
You do indeed owe the state nursing board and its investigator a duty to cooperate in your own investigation. Do not see your disciplinary investigation as a criminal court proceeding where you would have certain constitutional rights. A disciplinary proceeding is an administrative proceeding, not a criminal court case. You have no privilege against self-incrimination in your license disciplinary proceeding. If you refuse to answer investigator questions, the state nursing board may use your refusal against you, presuming that your answers would have incriminated you rather than exonerated you. Likewise, with your document response: if you destroy documents or refuse to produce them, the state nursing board can use that refusal against you, presuming that the documents would have incriminated rather than exonerated you. Let us handle your investigation response, including reserving your interview until after you have seen the disciplinary complaint, so that you do not violate your duty to cooperate, face obstruction charges, and suffer adverse inferences.
Qualifications of License Defense Counsel
The above discussion should have convinced you of your need to retain our highly qualified attorneys. Administrative license proceedings differ from criminal or civil court proceedings. Local criminal defense lawyers and civil litigators generally lack the substantial administrative knowledge and experience for effective license defense. Unqualified defense counsel can cause substantial harm to your defense, for instance, by failing to respect your obligation to cooperate and instead relying on rights that do not apply in an administrative matter. Because our attorneys devote their practices to administrative matters, we have the substantial skill and experience you need for a strategic and effective defense.
Requesting the Complaint and Investigation Report
We do not recommend that you proceed on your own, without representation. Yet if you must proceed on your own, at least initially, and you want the disciplinary complaint and investigation report, then you should request each document separately at the appropriate time, in writing, transmitted to the state nursing board and copied to the investigator. You should preserve your writing along with evidence of the date and confirmation of its transmission. You should request the disciplinary complaint before participating substantially in an investigation interview or document responses so that you are informed of the allegations. You should request the investigation report both before it is complete, for review, correction, and supplementation, and after it is complete, when the investigator conveys it to the state nursing board for action. Again, we do not recommend that you take any of these actions on your own, especially in light of your duty to cooperate. Instead, get the help you need from our highly qualified attorneys.
Premier Nursing License Defense Available
If you face a state nursing board disciplinary investigation, you should indeed have access to the disciplinary complaint and investigation report. To help you gain that access, retain the LLF National Law Firm’s premier Professional License Defense Team. Our highly qualified attorneys have helped hundreds of nurses and other healthcare professionals favorably defend and defeat licensing board charges. Let us help you do so, too. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now for our skilled and experienced representation.