Licensed nurses invest heavily in their nursing education and license, in order to enter a nursing profession, the beneficial and humanitarian services of which are critical to health and human flourishing. Your patients, facility, and employer need your nursing services, while you and your family may also depend on your nursing income. Don't lose your nursing license, employment, and career to state nursing board disciplinary charges over alleged inappropriate social media posts. Retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Professional License Defense Team for the highly qualified attorney representation you need to successfully defend your state nursing board disciplinary charges. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now.
Nurse Beneficial Use of Social Media
Nurses use social media, just like everyone else. Social media use is ubiquitous across American society. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Telegram, WeChat, YouTube, Substack, Medium, and other platforms all have substantial followings for general and niche audiences, including for nurses and other healthcare professionals. Nurses can learn a lot using social media, and networking with other nurses and healthcare professionals, while staying abreast of professional developments and matters affecting their patients, residents, facilities, and employers. Nurse use of social media can also provide relaxation, recreation, social connection, entertainment, and even deep learning, all benefits that may carry over to the professional workplace, keeping a nurse healthy, happy, connected, vital, informed, and alive.
Nurse Hazardous Use of Social Media
On the other hand, nurse use of social media can expose the nurse to the same social media hazards others can experience. Studies increasingly show or suggest that social media overuse and overexposure can shorten attention spans, exhaust concentration, propagandize perspective, manipulate purchasing patterns, and adversely affect self-image and mental health. In its worst iterations, social media use may lead to, cause, or contribute to so-called death scrolling, dopamine addiction, social withdrawal and self-isolation, anxiety, depression, distorted outlooks, pornography exposure, and other disturbances and addictions. Nurses need to show the same wisdom, restraint, and discipline as others need to show to use the technology and platforms discerning, to avoid personal harm and degradation.
The Workplace Relevance of Social Media Use
Nurse social media use can also be relevant to nursing practice itself, with potential adverse impacts on the nurse's workplace. Certainly, if a nurse wastes work time on personal social media, the nurse may face colleague condemnation, employment discipline, or even job termination. But workplace risks of outside social media can also be real and substantial. Your use of personal time for social media can in certain instances affect your work performance or qualification. If, for instance, your social media use exhausts you, leaving you sleepless, fatigued, lacking concentration, and depressed, you may lose your fitness for nursing practice, commit nursing errors, neglect patients, and even suffer an impairing mental, emotional, or physical condition. Beware your mental and physical health and nursing fitness related to overuse or inappropriate use of social media. Be sensitive to the workplace risks that personal social media use can present.
Specific Risks of Social Media Misuse
The potential adverse impact of nurse social media use goes beyond the general health and fitness effects described above. Your personal social media use may directly or indirectly violate nursing rules and standards, causing unacceptable workplace risks or harm. If, for instance, your social media use influences you to share confidential patient information in violation of HIPAA laws, rules, and regulations, you could cause patient embarrassment and harm, trigger regulatory action against your facility and employer, lose your job, and face nursing license discipline from your state nursing board. If, for another example, your social media use directly or indirectly embarrasses, offends, demeans, or defames a patient, work colleague, supervisor, employer, or employer representative, those individuals and entities could suffer reputational harm and mental distress, and you could face civil liability, disciplinary charges, and job termination. Be aware of the risks of social media misuse. Let us help you extricate yourself from social media misuse disciplinary charges and related allegations and concerns.
Warnings Against Social Media Misuse
The above cautions are not exaggerated. Responsible healthcare professional associations share similar warnings. The American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN), for one example, warns of the Do's and Don'ts of Social Media Use for Nursing Professionals. The National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN), for another example, publishes A Nurse's Guide to the Use of Social Media. The American Nurses Association (ANA), for a third example, publishes Social Media Principles. These and other publications warn about the general, specific, and dire risks of social media misuse. Nurses are not alone in facing warnings of the risks of inappropriate social media use. Doctors, dentists, psychologists, and other healthcare professionals face similar warnings, as do lawyers, accountants, teachers, social workers, and other professionals outside the healthcare field.
Issues Nurse Social Media Misuse Creates
The above discussion already suggests the various issues that nurse social media misuse can create. Those issues go well beyond your personal health and professional fitness to practice nursing. Your social media misuse may also trigger regulatory concerns for your facility or employer, if federal or state officials threaten to revoke licenses, accreditations, or approvals, or impose fines and injunctions, for HIPAA and similar violations. Your social media misuse may also trigger civil liability lawsuits for breach of patient confidentiality, defamation, infliction of emotional distress, and other harm. Your social media misuse may adversely affect your patient, colleague, supervisor, and other professional relationships. Your social media misuse may lead to your employment discipline or termination and the discipline or termination of others. Your social media misuse may lead to state nursing board disciplinary charges, costing you a license suspension, revocation, or other discipline. Beware the many potential adverse effects of social media misuse. Retain us to help you avoid, minimize, correct, and deal with the consequences.
Examples of Nurse Social Media Misuse
Nurse social media use has more ways than one in which to create workplace, employment, liability, regulatory, and disciplinary issues. It is not just that your social media use might accidentally lead to your disclosure of confidential patient information violating HIPAA and state nursing board standards. Examples of social media misuse go well beyond confidentiality breaches. They can also include:
- false and defamatory statements that harm the reputation of patients, colleagues, supervisors, and others involved in your nursing practice;
- invasion of privacy in the form of public disclosure of private facts involving patients, colleagues, and others in your workplace;
- revealing and destroying the value of confidential proprietary information belonging to your hospital or other facility or employer;
- copyright, trademark, and similar violations of your hospital, facility, or employer interests;
- spreading false or misleading healthcare warnings and information, creating public misinformation and unnecessary alarm;
- disparaging patient classes, categories, or characteristics, or legitimate disease or injury concerns, undermining employer and public interests;
- disparaging the skills, commitment, and character of other nurses and professionals, causing loss of patient confidence; and
- undermining workplace morale and confidence in the integrity and operations of the facility.
Discovery of Nurse Social Media Misuse
You may wonder how your workplace and state nursing board disciplinary officials may learn of your social media use to have concerns over its misuse. While some social media platforms offer reasonable security to keep posts confidential within certain trusted online communities, recent history teaches that anything posted in any forum online has the prospect for widespread, even public, release. Your trusted friends within a private online community may at some point no longer be so trustworthy. They may publicly repost or otherwise release your private online communications, making them public. Hackers may gain access to your private online posts. Others learning about your private posts may gain court orders or platform agreement to release those posts to them for use in an employment, regulatory, or disciplinary proceeding. The better rule is only to post online in any forum, information the public release of which you could tolerate, accept, and defend.
Reporting of Nurse Social Media Misuse
You may also find that certain members of your professional and online communities believe themselves to have a duty to report your suspected social media misuse. State nursing practice acts and state nursing board rules vary widely in how they treat a nurse's duty to report a colleague's suspected misconduct. So do state-by-state physician rules and state rules for other healthcare professionals. However, the American Nurses Association Code of Ethics clearly requires nurses to report colleague misconduct, as a Journal of Nursing Regulation survey confirms. You may find that a nurse acquaintance of yours, familiar with your social media posts, reports suspected social media misuse to your state nursing board to fulfill presumed or actual reporting duties. Your facility or employer may have its own reporting rule that your colleagues may follow to bring your social media misuse to the facility or employer's attention, from where it may end up before state nursing board disciplinary officials. Let us help you deal with the disciplinary charges if reporters raise concerns with your state nursing board's disciplinary officials. Indeed, let us help you respond to any such concerns before the complaint gets made. We may be able to help you head off charges.
Nursing Board Disciplinary Authority
Your state nursing board has the authority to impose discipline against your license if it finds that you committed misconduct involving social media misuse or other matters. State nursing boards issue nurse licenses. Yet state nursing practice acts also routinely give the state nursing board the additional power and responsibility to suspend or revoke licenses when a nurse is no longer fit for practice. Section 464.018 of the Florida Nurse Practice Act is an example, authorizing the Florida Board of Nursing to impose discipline on a long list of grounds. Section 678.111 of the Oregon Nurse Practice Act is another example, also providing for discipline on a long list of grounds. Don't doubt your state nursing board's authority, willingness, and readiness to discipline you for any appropriate reason, including your misuse of social media.
Board Authority to Discipline Social Media Use
State nursing practice acts and state nursing board rules state sufficiently broad grounds for nurse discipline to reach social media misuse. Few if any acts and rules specifically mention social media and prohibit its misuse. But social media misuse that impacts patients, nursing practice, or the nurse's facility, or calls the nursing profession into public disrepute, would clearly fall within general, catch-all provisions authorizing discipline for things like unprofessional conduct or unfitness.
The Florida and Oregon nurse practice acts cited above are again good examples. Section 464.018 of the Florida Nurse Practice Act includes both unprofessional conduct and “failing to meet minimal standards of acceptable and prevailing nursing practice” within its disciplinary grounds. Disciplinary officials could construe the latter provision to incorporate the social media misuse warnings and admonitions of the professional nursing associations mentioned above, particularly the American Nurses Association. Indeed, some state nursing practice acts or state nursing board rules expressly refer to and incorporate such professional association standards. Similarly, the Oregon Nurse Practice Act's Section 678.111 includes “conduct derogatory to the standards of nursing” as a ground for discipline, again likely reaching the professional association admonishes against social media misuse. We can help you raise arguments that your state nursing board lacks authority to discipline social media misuse, but those arguments may not be effective, depending on your state's laws, rules, and regulations, and the facts of your specific case.
Forms of Discipline for Social Media Misuse
If your state nursing board finds that your social media use constituted misconduct under a provision like those just discussed, then your state nursing practice act will authorize a wide range of sanctions for the board to impose at its discretion. State nursing practice acts routinely authorize license suspension or revocation. But they also often expressly mention lesser sanctions like probation or license limitation and typically state or imply that the state nursing board may fashion other appropriate sanctions. Section 301.453 of the Texas Nurse Practice Act is an example, authorizing not only license suspension or revocation but also warning, reprimand, limitation or restriction, fine, counseling, remedial education, supervision, and public service.
Your state nursing practice act will likely authorize a similarly broad range of potential sanctions. While this long list may be daunting, we may be able to turn it very much to your favor. Even if your state nursing board finds that you violated its rules and standards through social media misuse, board discretion enables us to make a case for mitigating your sanction. We may even be able to eliminate punitive sanctions in favor of remedial measures like education or training. Your employer may terminate you for any discipline or even an allegation without a finding. But our successful efforts to preserve your license may also preserve your employment. We can communicate with your employer about our efforts, diligence, and success, to encourage your employer to continue your employment during the state nursing board proceeding and after any successful resolution we achieve for you.
The License Impact of Social Media Use Discipline
The above discussion hasn't yet suggested how state nursing board officials may generally feel about a social media misuse violation or what the impact of license discipline may be. What your state nursing board does depends a lot on your matter's peculiar facts, particularly what your alleged social media misuse entailed and whether it harmed others. But assuming for the moment that your state nursing board decides to impose some discipline, whether a serious or minor sanction, be cognizant that discipline for social media misuse can have serious license impacts.
First, your employer may decide to terminate your employment, even if you retain a valid license and your employer does not have to do so. Your employer may judge that the risks of continuing your employment exceed the value of retaining you. It may decide that your social media misuse has too greatly damaged workplace morale and relationships to retain you. Whatever its reasoning, your loss of employment can obviously seriously impact your finances and your ability to support yourself and your family. Your license discipline could also cause you to lose your nursing licenses in other states and your ability to gain a new nursing license in another state, once your state nursing board enters your discipline in the national Nursys database. Other personal and professional impacts could follow.
Defenses to Social Media Use Disciplinary Charges
Despite the above serious risks of substantial impact, we may be able to raise winning defenses to your social media misuse disciplinary charges. First, you may not have been the author of the disputed posts. Others may have posted the information in your name, hacking and misusing your accounts. Second, your posts may not have violated any law, rule, or standard and may instead have been innocent, misconstrued, or misunderstood. Third, you may not have published your posts even if they were objectionable. Others may have hacked your private communications to distribute publicly or otherwise outside your intent. And even if you published posts that violated your state nursing board's rules and standards, your wrong may not have endangered, damaged, offended, or embarrassed anyone to any degree warranting a serious sanction. You may also have no prior record of discipline and instead a great record of valuable nursing practice accentuated by professional service. Let us raise all possible defenses while also making a case in mitigation of any sanction.
Protective Procedures Against Social Media Discipline
We will certainly have a good opportunity to present your defense case when you promptly retain us. You have the constitutional due process right against state nursing board discipline without fair notice and a fair hearing. State nursing practice acts recognize that due process right by either providing their own hearing rules or adopting the state's administrative procedure act with its own due process protections. The Texas Nurse Practice Act is an example. Its Section 301.458 offers a formal hearing on disciplinary charges while providing that the hearing must conform to the protections of the state's Administrative Procedure Act. Related provisions assure fair notice, discovery, and other protections. Your state nursing practice act will offer similar protections.
The Role of the License Defense Attorney
The above rights and procedural protections enable us to ensure that you understand exactly what social media posts the state nursing board maintains violated its rules and standards. We can discover the board's evidence while sharing with it your explanation and exonerating or mitigating evidence. We may also be able to arrange a conciliation conference at which to advocate and negotiate for early voluntary board dismissal of your disciplinary charges or for remedial measures that you can readily perform. If the board insists on formal charges, we can invoke your right to a formal hearing at which to present your evidence and challenge the board's adverse witnesses and incriminating evidence. If you have already lost your formal hearing, retain us to take your available appeals, seek civil court review, and negotiate alternative special relief through general counsel.
Qualifications of Counsel
Do not retain an unqualified local criminal defense counsel to handle your state nursing board disciplinary proceedings. Disciplinary proceedings are administrative in nature, not the same as criminal or civil court litigation. The laws, rules, and procedures all differ. Our attorneys have the administrative skills and experience in license defense matters that you need for your best disciplinary outcome.
Premier License Defense Available
If you face state nursing board disciplinary charges relating to alleged inappropriate social media posts, retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Professional License Defense Team for your best disciplinary outcome. Our highly qualified attorneys have successfully represented hundreds of nurses and other healthcare professionals against disciplinary charges of all kinds including charges related to social media use. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now to get the help you need for your best possible disciplinary outcome.
