Your nursing practice is in a highly regulated employment and healthcare environment. Hospitals, nursing homes, clinics, and other places where nurses commonly care for patients impose thickets of laws, rules, codes, standards, policies, and regulations with which nurses must comply. You likely had courses or classes in the legal and ethical issues within nursing. Those issues are important and serious because of the hazards to patients who receive substandard nursing care. For all these reasons, when nurses face nurse licensing board issues, nurses need highly qualified, skilled, and experienced legal representation. Don't go it alone or with unqualified local counsel. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now to retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Professional License Defense Team, if you face nurse licensing board issues or related issues. Preserve and protect your nursing license, practice, employment, and career.
Types of Legal Issues for Nurses
Nurses can face daunting legal issues not just in one direction but in several directions. A single event or series of events can have a nurse facing legal issues with several different individuals or entities, each with their own interests, complaints, and concerns, and each involving different laws and legal forums. Let our premier Professional License Defense Team attorneys help you identify, sort out, and favorably resolve all your legal issues relating to your professional practice and licensure, including the following common issues.
State Nursing Board Issues
State nursing board issues are often the first and greatest concern a nurse faces when an adverse event suggesting the nurse's potential unfitness arises. That concern is natural and understandable. If you lose your nursing license, you'll lose everything else related to your continued nursing practice. You'll lose your nursing license, your facility access as a practicing nurse, your employer's ability to gain reimbursement for your services, and your relationships with your patients and their family members. Our attorneys have represented hundreds of nurses and other healthcare practitioners before licensing boards nationwide. We have the knowledge, skills, and experience, as well as the reputation and relationships with state nursing board officials, to help you achieve the best possible outcome for your nursing license issues. Let us help.
Employer Issues for Nurses Facing Discipline
Employers of nurses also have understandable concerns when one of their nurses faces allegations of an event suggesting their unfitness for continued nursing employment. Your employer may have a regulatory duty to report your suspected misconduct to state nursing board officials. Your employer may also have significant concerns over potential nursing malpractice liability if it continues to employ you after concerns over your nursing surface. If you have already faced a state nursing board investigation, your employer may take preemptive action to terminate you, even before the licensing board takes any action, and even if you did not violate any nursing rule or standard. Our attorneys can help you communicate with your employer that we are diligently and effectively advocating on your behalf with the state nursing board, to voluntarily dismiss the investigation and any misconduct charges. Our assurances may induce your employer to retain you until we prevail on your behalf in the licensing proceeding. Let us help you retain your employment while we conduct your licensing defense.
Facility Issues for Nurses Facing Discipline
Hospitals, nursing homes, and other facilities where nurses care for patients can also present legal issues for nurses, when a nurse faces disciplinary charges. Just as in the case of your employer, the facility where you care for patients may take preemptive action to bar you from the facility, to avoid regulatory and malpractice risks, even before your disciplinary proceeding concludes. You could lose your practice base and, with that loss, your employment, simply because your hospital, clinic, or nursing home won't let you continue working until your disciplinary proceeding concludes. Let us communicate and advocate with your facility managers and supervisors as necessary to retain your nursing practice privileges, while we advocate on your behalf with your state nursing board investigators and other disciplinary officials.
Health Plan and Program Issues for Nurses Facing Discipline
Private health insurance plans and government healthcare programs can also present legal issues for nurses when they face disciplinary proceedings. Health insurance plans and programs do not generally provide reimbursement for services that unlicensed, unfit, incompetent, impaired, or otherwise unsafe healthcare practitioners perform. Plans and programs may have statutory or regulatory duties not to pay for such care. Although plan and program managers should wait for your nursing license proceeding to conclude, they may not do so. They may preemptively refuse to reimburse your facility or employer for your services to an insured or covered patient. Let us help you reassure plan and program managers that we are diligently working to favorably conclude your disciplinary proceeding, with a substantial likelihood of its dismissal.
Patient and Family Member Issues for Nurses Facing Discipline
Patients and their family members may also exhibit substantial concerns regarding your nursing care if you have a nursing board license proceeding pending. Indeed, they may have initiated the proceeding or may have threatened to do so. Our attorneys can help you sensitively and diplomatically respond to patient and family member concerns over your nursing care and fitness. They may be unwilling to listen to you but more willing to listen to the presentation we make of your explanation for what they mistakenly believe to have been substandard nursing care. Physician orders frequently put nurses in difficult positions of doing things patients do not understand or refusing to do things patients demand. Don't let such misunderstandings unnecessarily trigger disciplinary complaints and lead to patients refusing your nursing care. Let us help you retain the confidence not only of your employer, facility, and reimbursement plans but also your patients and their family members.
The Nursing License Complaint Process
Your nurse license proceeding has its own statutory and regulatory procedures. State nursing practice acts routinely afford accused nurses with fair notice and a fair hearing before an impartial official or panel. They must do so to satisfy your constitutional due process rights. The Texas Nursing Practice Act is an example. It's Section 301.511 requires the Texas Board of Nursing to comply with the state's Administrative Procedure Act, codified at Chapter 2001 of the state's Government Code. State administrative procedure acts generally provide for hearings of contested cases before an administrative law judge, at which you may present testimony and exhibits and challenge the nursing board's exhibits and witnesses, to disprove the disciplinary charges. State license discipline procedures also generally offer appeals and other procedural protections. The process is complicated but also fair and helpful, when we strategically invoke it on your behalf.
How We Help You Through the Complaint Process
Our attorneys have handled hundreds of successful licensing proceedings before state nursing boards and boards of licensing of other healthcare professionals. Each license defense case is unique. But our attorneys generally perform the following tasks, one or more of which may be key to your successful outcome.
Lawyer Services for the Complaint Stage
At the complaint stage, if you retain us soon enough, the moment you get wind of a potential disciplinary complaint, our attorneys can communicate with the employer, colleague, patient, patient's family member, facility representative, or other person who has the concern over your nursing care. Our communications may reassure that person and head off the complaint.
Lawyer Services for the Investigation Stage
At the investigation stage, our attorneys can contact and communicate with the state nursing board investigator, as soon as you learn of a complaint and ongoing investigation. The investigator may contact you only after interviewing all witnesses and gathering all documentation. But we may be able to reach out to the investigator with your information, documentation, and explanation, before the investigator forms opinions and reaches conclusions against you. We can also attend your investigatory interview to help you present accurate, complete, and truthful information, and reliable documentation, all to head off a formal charge.
Lawyer Services for the Charge Stage
If the investigation results in a formal charge, our attorneys can help you evaluate and answer the charge. If the charge is vague, we can obtain a specification of the charge. We can also obtain the evidence in support of the charge so that we know what evidence we must gather on your behalf to overcome the incriminating evidence. We can also arrange conciliation conferences to advocate for early voluntary dismissal of the charge. With your approval, we may also be able to offer remedial measures like additional education and training, to convince disciplinary officials to forgo further proceedings and dismiss the charge.
Lawyer Services for the Hearing Stage
If your matter proceeds to the hearing stage, our attorneys can help you and your witnesses prepare for the hearing. We can appear at the hearing to present your testimony and the testimony of your exonerating witnesses, while cross-examining adverse witnesses. We can also prepare and file hearing briefs, make opening statements, and closing arguments until we have obtained your best possible hearing outcome.
Lawyer Services for the Appeal Stage
If you have already lost your formal hearing before your state nursing board, our attorneys can invoke your administrative appeal rights. Your appeal may be to the full nursing board or another appeal panel or official. We know the appeal rules, procedures, and review standards, and we know how to make your most compelling presentation of the error in the adverse decision.
Lawyer Services for the Post-Appeal Stage
If you have already lost your hearing and appeals, our attorneys may be able to invoke court review under your state's administrative procedure act. Court review may be limited, but our attorneys know how to show the court the errors that they have the authority to correct. We may alternatively be able to negotiate special relief through the state nursing board's assistant attorney general or other state oversight officials.
Why Nurses Need Skilled Lawyer Representation
You can see from the above discussion the vital role that our informed, sensitive, timely, balanced, and well-documented communications and advocacy can play in preserving your nursing license practice, employment, and career. You may have perfect confidence in your nursing skills. You have every good reason to do so, based on your education, training, examination, licensure, and experience. Don't doubt your nursing skills. But don't exaggerate your investigation, legal research, advocacy, oral and written communication, and negotiation skills. Those are the skills of an administrative lawyer, not of a nurse. You may have tons of nursing experience. You probably don't have much, if any, experience in nursing license matters, especially not experience managing and advocating through their complex procedures. So instead of going it alone and suffering unnecessary license discipline, let our highly qualified Professional License Defense Team attorneys represent you for your better outcome.
The Cost of Unqualified Representation
You should also avoid retaining unqualified lawyer representation. The local criminal defense lawyer, personal injury attorney, or real estate or business attorney whom you know or who others recommend to you likely does not have the professional licensing administrative knowledge, skills, and experience necessary for your best disciplinary outcome. They may know court laws, rules, and procedures, but court laws, rules, and procedures differ from nursing license laws and nursing license discipline administrative procedures. Unqualified counsel may invoke the wrong procedures, relying on the wrong law, and presenting the wrong evidence and arguments in an inappropriately adversarial fashion. The administrative officials involved in your license proceeding have different norms, customs, and expectations. If your unqualified counsel cannot even communicate with them with the civility they expect, you won't likely gain your best result. Trust our highly skilled and experienced attorneys instead.
Premier Lawyers for Nurses
If you are a nurse facing professional licensing issues, retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Professional License Defense Team to help you efficiently and effectively resolve those issues. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now for our highly qualified representation.
