If you face a state nursing board disciplinary investigation, you face a risk not only that formal disciplinary charges will follow, subjecting your license to suspension or revocation, but also that disciplinary officials will suspend your license during the investigation to protect patients and the public. Don’t run the risk of losing your nursing practice and employment to license discipline. Retain the LLF National Law Firm’s premier Professional License Defense Team the moment that you learn of a disciplinary investigation. We can help you respond properly and effectively to the investigation, keep your license during the investigation, and defend and defeat any disciplinary charges that follow. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now for the skilled and experienced representation you need to preserve your nursing license.
State Nursing Board Investigation Authority
State nursing boards have authority under state nursing practice acts not only to license nurses but also to investigate their alleged violation of nursing standards and discipline licenses. See, for example, the Nevada Nurse Practice Act authorizing the Nevada State Board of Nursing to respond to allegations of nurse misconduct, investigate those allegations, and discipline the accused nurse’s license up to suspension or revocation. The Nevada Nurse Practice Act expressly authorizes the state nursing board investigator to deploy subpoena powers to gain access to testimony and records. State nursing practice acts and state nursing board rules and practices routinely authorize investigators to make records requests, conduct witness interviews, and prepare investigation reports on which the state nursing board will act to issue disciplinary charges. Don’t fool around with your disciplinary investigation. Get our skilled defense help.
State Nursing Board Sanction Authority
Also, don’t underestimate your state nursing board’s authority to suspend, revoke, or otherwise discipline your nursing license. State nursing practice acts routinely authorize a wide range of disciplinary sanctions to protect patients and the public from the dangers of unfit nurses and incompetent nursing. See, for example, the South Carolina Nurse Practice Act authorizing the South Carolina Board of Nursing to “cancel, fine, suspend, [or] revoke” a nursing license, to “issue a public reprimand or a private reprimand, or restrict” a license, to place a licensee on probation, or to impose “other reasonable action such as requiring additional education and training.” Your state nursing practice act will doubtless grant your state nursing board similarly broad authority to discipline your license if an investigation establishes good cause. Don’t lose your license to suspension. Get our help responding to your license investigation and any disciplinary charges that follow.
State Nursing Board Interim Suspension Authority
Your risk isn’t only that you may lose your nursing license following a disciplinary charge and hearing. You also risk losing your nursing license during an investigation. State nursing practice acts typically provide for some emergency nursing board powers when necessary to protect patients and the public against imminent harm. Many nursing mishaps involve one-time events unlikely to repeat, such as a nursing error in assisting a patient with ambulation, resulting in a patient fall and injury. But some nursing issues involve continuous patient exposure to nursing practice risks, such as when a nurse practices while impaired by drugs or alcohol, or exhibits a violent character or mental impairment. Those cases may require immediate license suspension to protect patients, even before the state nursing board has completed its investigation, issued formal disciplinary charges, and completed a disciplinary hearing.
See, for example, the Nevada Nurse Practice Act already cited above. The Nevada Nurse Practice Act expressly authorizes the board to issue an immediate license suspension when “the health, safety, or welfare of the public, or any patient served by the licensee is at risk of imminent or continued harm….” The National Council of State Boards of Nursing confirms that most, if not all, state nursing boards have some form of emergency powers to suspend a license, generally when convincing evidence exists that the accused nurse’s continued practice presents a continuing risk of serious patient harm. Your state nursing practice act likely has a similar provision. If you face a disciplinary investigation, promptly retain our attorneys to respond to the investigation so that it does not result in your license’s emergency suspension.
Grounds for Interim Emergency Suspension
You may be most concerned about the potential grounds for immediate license suspension during the investigation. You’ve already seen above that the grounds generally involve risk of imminent patient harm. Any nursing practice or impairment that presents such a risk of patient injury, harm, or loss could potentially be grounds for immediate license suspension. Common grounds for immediate license suspension may include the following:
- substantial evidence of a substance abuse, addiction, or dependency issue interfering with nursing practice;
- evidence of a mental delusion or physical impairment directly affecting safe nursing practice;
- convincing evidence such as a criminal conviction of a strong propensity for serious violence;
- criminal conviction or other convincing evidence of criminal conduct directly related to nursing practice, such as drug diversion;
- evidence of such frequent and endangering incompetence as to exhibit a lack of basic nursing skills;
- substantial evidence of patient abuse or neglect clearly subjecting patients to continuing harm.
If the allegations against you are of the above nature or involve other similar substantial patient risks of serious harm, loss, or injury, retain us to make your best case to the investigator that you do not present a continuing practice risk. We may be able to put into place safeguards that the investigator and other disciplinary officials will accept to enable you to continue your practice while the board determines whether to proceed with formal disciplinary charges.
State Nursing Board Investigation Process
The process of your state nursing board disciplinary investigation will likely have a lot to do with whether you will face an emergency license suspension during the investigation. State nursing boards receive complaints from patients, their family members, nursing colleagues, employer representatives, facility representatives, and the public. Board officials review the complaints for sufficiency before assigning potentially meritorious complaints to an investigator. The investigator may contact other witnesses and obtain medical, nursing, employment, education, and other records before or after notifying the accused nurse of the pending investigation. If the investigator finds a continuing risk of imminent and serious patient harm from the accused nurse’s practice, the investigator may request the board to issue an immediate interim suspension order.
The investigator may then interview the accused nurse and obtain the nurse’s own records, all toward completing a detailed investigation report. The accused nurse may or may not have the opportunity to review and correct or supplement a preliminary report before the final report goes to the state nursing board for action. If the investigator recommends disciplinary charges, the board is likely to follow the recommendation with formal charges, followed by a hearing and disciplinary decision.
Responding to a State Nursing Board Investigation
Retain us immediately if you learn of a pending disciplinary investigation. You may learn from colleagues whom the investigator has already contacted. Or you may learn from a notice of investigation that your state nursing board issues. In either case, when you retain us, we can promptly reach out to the investigator to aid you in your communications. We can help you identify, acquire, organize, and present your exonerating and mitigating evidence to the investigator, so that the investigation report includes your account of the matter. We can also help you ensure that your statements and representations to the investigator are accurate, truthful, and complete. Otherwise, the state nursing board may construe your inaccuracies or misleading omissions as your deliberate attempt to obstruct the investigation, resulting in obstruction charges.
Our attorneys may also be able to communicate with the investigator and other state nursing board officials about any remedial measures you have already taken to address the board’s disciplinary concerns. We can help you discern the best remedial measures to take and implement a remediation plan. We may then be able to negotiate during the investigation stage with disciplinary officials for a voluntary dismissal of the complaint in exchange for your commitment to complete remediation. Let us help you head off disciplinary charges if possible.
Preserving Your License During Investigation
We may also be able to preserve your license during the investigation if the investigation gives cause for concern that your nursing practice may continue to represent a patient danger. Our prompt presentation of remedial measures, such as a temporary voluntary restriction or limitation on your license, mentoring, and supervision, may reassure the investigator that you do not present a practice risk and may preserve your license during the investigation. Whatever event triggered the investigation, we may be able to show the investigator that you present no risk of repeating the alleged wrongs, either by having removed yourself from the situation, correcting the triggering circumstances, or simply not having been responsible for the alleged wrong in the first place. Let us make your best defense case not just at a later formal hearing but during the investigation, so that you can preserve your license and continue your nursing practice.
Defending State Nursing Board Disciplinary Charges
As just suggested, your effective defense of state nursing board allegations should begin at the investigation stage. Our attorneys have an orderly way of proving a defense to disciplinary charges. Your first task when learning of an investigation is to determine the nature of the allegations so that you are able to respond. We can help learn the nature of the complaint, including who complained and what they claim you did or did not do. Using that information, we can identify the evidence that may contradict the allegations, proving them false, or that may otherwise exonerate you or mitigate any sanction. We can also help you acquire your defense evidence, analyze it, and determine a sensible presentation order.
Once we have your defense evidence, including refreshing your own recollection of what happened based on all the evidence, we can often arrange an early conciliation conference. A conciliation conference gives us the opportunity to present your defense informally, through discussion, well before the formal hearing and indeed sometimes even before any formal disciplinary charges. A conciliation conference also allows us to offer remedial measures as an alternative to license suspension or other disciplinary sanctions. If your matter proceeds through investigation to formal charges, we may be able to arrange a settlement conference before the disciplinary hearing, with the same object of informally presenting your defense while advocating and negotiating for a non-disciplinary outcome that preserves your nursing license.
The Qualifications of License Defense Counsel
You should see from the above discussion the sensitivity that responding effectively to a state nursing board investigation requires. On the one hand, the accused nurse needs to cooperate, take responsibility, and act responsibly to reassure the nursing board that the nurse presents no continuing risk of patient harm. On the other hand, the accused nurse should not admit to alleged wrongs that the nurse did not actually commit. And again, on the one hand, the accused nurse may need to swiftly adopt and complete remedial measures to reassure the board that the nurse presents no practice risk and does not require an immediate license suspension. Yet on the other hand, the accused nurse should not engage in remedial measures that bear no relationship to anything that the nurse actually did, in doing so, admit to wrongs that the nurse did not commit. Our attorneys know how to deal strategically with these sensitivities. Do not retain unqualified local criminal defense counsel. Get our skilled and experienced help.
Premier Nursing License Defense Available
If you face a state nursing board investigation or have already suffered disciplinary charges, retain the LLF National Law Firm’s premier Professional License Defense Team to help you respond to the investigation and defend and defeat the disciplinary charges. Our highly qualified attorneys help hundreds of nurses and other healthcare professionals preserve their licenses against disciplinary investigation and charges. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now for our strategic and effective representation.