Nurses can be named as part of a personal injury lawsuit that involves potentially mismanaged medical care. You may be wondering, how can nurses avoid having complaints filed against them? Nurses can start to protect themselves from being part of a medical lawsuit by clearly understanding their responsibilities and following their professional duties.
Understanding Your Training Limitations
Nurses are valuable members of any medical team. They will undergo extensive training and schooling to ensure they can care for patients safely and properly.
Depending on the complexity of the practice, the patient caseload, and the staffing situation, nurses sometimes are asked to do more than they should. It is important for any nurse to understand his or her limitations regarding training and schooling, in order to answer the question of how can nurses avoid having complaints filed against them.
A nurse should not agree to take on medical tasks that he or she cannot perform safely, placing the patient in harm’s way.
Avoiding Negligence
Nurses often can avoid having a complaint filed against them by following simple steps. Ultimately, a nurse has a responsibility and a legal duty of care to treat the patient to the best of his or her ability. Should the nurse commit a breach of duty during the care, he or she could be found negligent. To avoid this, a nurse should take a few steps, including:
- Do not accept tasks for which you do not have training.
- Make sure you fully understand what you are being asked to do before starting a task.
- Ask for additional training if you believe you are being asked to do a task for which you are not ready.
- Do not delegate your tasks to others unless you are certain the other person is trained and fully understands the task.
Finally, always complete your paperwork fully and on time. If you performed a task, but you did not include it in the patient file, legally, it did not happen. Having a full record of the steps you have taken in the patient files will help your case, should you ever end up as part of a medical malpractice lawsuit.
Managing Complaints Against Nurses in Florida
When someone chooses to file a complaint against a nurse, it starts with the Florida Health Care Complaint Portal. The Florida Board of Nursing oversees the licensing and applications for nurses in the state, and it also allows people to start the process of filing a complaint through the portal.
Multiple people potentially can file a complaint against a nurse. It does not have to be the patient or the patient’s family. Anyone who witnesses misconduct on the part of the nurse has the ability to file the complaint. Those who can file a complaint include:
- Patient
- Patient’s family
- Doctors
- Other nurses
- Other co-workers
We Will Protect Your Interests
Medical malpractice lawsuits can involve a number of potential defendants, including nurses. At the Law Offices of Anidjar & Levine, our attorneys know how to study the facts in a medical malpractice case, determining exactly which people should be part of the case.
We will go the extra mile for our clients. How can nurses avoid having complaints filed against them? Call us today at 1-800-747-3733 for a free review of your case.
