Legal Nurse Consulting: Part of a Fast Growing Sector (Ed-Med)

Legal nurse consulting is part of the largest sector of jobs in the U.S. economy and the fastest growing sector in the rest of the world: the Ed-Med sector. This means the jobs devoted to education or medicine/health care. We know that manufacturing is on the decline and the service industry is on the rise, so argues Daniel Pink in To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others.

LNCs engage in Ed-Med

Legal nurse consultants are poster children for Ed-Med.

• We provide a lot of education to attorneys, to juries, to plaintiffs, to defendants.
• We educate through our reports, testimony, conversations, exhibits, and in other ways.
• We take complex medical records and break them down into simpler, more accessible work products such as timelines, chronologies, or analysis reports.
• We teach attorneys about medical terms, abbreviations, procedures, and concepts.
• We write expert witness reports for mediators, judges and juries.
• We testify at depositions and in the courtroom to explain standard of care, details of care, and medical or nursing procedures.
• We take our clinical knowledge and bring it into the law firm.

Clearly we are rooted in medicine, the second part of the Ed-Med piece. We know that prospects for jobs in health care continue to be strong. All of the demographics are in our favor as nurses. The “med” part of the equation is easy to understand. We explain medical and nursing concepts.

Daniel Pink argues that Ed-Med involves sales, as do many occupations not used to thinking of themselves as being in sales. As legal nurse consultants, our job is to persuade. This is clearest when we are functioning as expert witnesses, when we define our opinions about the standard of care.

But we also turn on our persuasive and analytical powers when we screen a case for merit or refute the position of the opposing counsel’s experts. We work to influence, persuade, and change behavior. That makes legal nurse consultants sales people, like it or not, and rooted in Ed-Med.

Pat Iyer MSN RN LNCC is president of The Pat Iyer Group LLC
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