Four Steps to Create an LNC Sample Work Product Part 2

You have an interview with an attorney to discuss your services as a legal nurse consultant. The attorney asks you to bring sample work product. You say, “Help! I’ve never done a case.” In part 1, I explained how to use a case from your clinical experience to create a fictitious work product. In this blog post, I share the rest of the process.

Create a scenario for your LNC sample work product

After you’ve identified damages (the poor patient outcome), you’ll need to create a scenario that identifies breach of duty and causation. As you know, breach of duty refers to failure of healthcare provider(s) to adhere to standards of care. If the breach caused damages, it’s medical malpractice. As an example, let’s say that you remember a time when a doctor ordered an inappropriately high concentration of potassium chloride for IV administration. In your scenario, the pharmacy filled and delivered the medication, which had a flag noting the high concentration. The nurse administered the potassium chloride through a peripheral IV, which caused extensive soft tissue and tendon necrosis in the patient’s hand.

In your scenario, there are breaches in standards of care by the physician, the nurse, and possibly the pharmacist. Your scenario also includes causation, because the damages were the direct result of the healthcare workers’ actions. Augment your LNC sample work product with dates, times, places, and names of the patient and providers. Ensure that you don’t use real names. I use an internet random name generator when I create LNC sample work products. Continue to add to your scenario to include information before and after the incident. For example, add the condition of the patient’s hand prior to the administration of the potassium chloride and workers’ actions after the administration.

Create an LNC sample work product report

Format your information into at least one sample report. In this case, the example scenario lends itself to a medical summary, a medical chronology, or both. Your samples don’t have to be long – several pages are fine. If you’re unsure how to format a report, there are free samples on the internet as well as samples you can purchase from the American Association of Legal Nurse Consultants. The books Legal Nurse Consulting: Principles & Practices also contain LNC sample work product.

Proofread

Proofread, proofread, and proofread again! Your LNC sample work product must be flawless in terms of spelling and grammar. Remember to use spell check and enable the grammar check in Microsoft Word. The online sites Grammarly and PaperRater are also resources for checking grammar and punctuation. If your writing skills aren’t perfect, consider taking Pat Iyer’s writing skills multimedia course.

Using this four-step system will enable you to create quality samples of work product. Show your samples to attorneys when you meet with them. You won’t tell the attorneys that you based your samples on real litigation because you didn’t. Instead, when you present your reports, tell attorneys that you’ve created some samples to show the type of work product that you are capable of creating.

Katy Jones created this guest blog post. She has analyzed medical malpractice, personal injury and nursing home cases for both Plaintiff and Defense. In addition, she has been a supervising LNC who trained legal nurses in medical record analysis, report writing, internet research, trial preparation and use of software such as CaseMap, PowerPoint, and other applications. She has taught in two legal nurse consultant programs. She is currently an LNC in a Defense firm that specializes in physician medical malpractice cases. Subscribe to Katy’s tips at www.lnctips.com.

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