Medical errors during labor and delivery are a leading cause of litigation. Within this area, shoulder dystocia cases are prominent. If you don’t have extensive experience as a labor and delivery nurse, you may not be familiar with the details of shoulder dystocia? Here to explain the complexities that can result in this condition is Karen Harmon, an LNC with 28 years of experience in labor and delivery.

She describes some of the health conditions that can lead to this, including diabetes, morbid obesity, shoulder dystocia in a previous delivery. She also notes warning signs that may show up during the course of prenatal care.

This may be one of the most important podcasts you’ll ever listen to or read. Operating room errors have significance not only for you as a legal nurse consultant but in your life and that of your family and friends.

Samantha Patten, an experienced OR nurse, is here to advise you on how to ensure you get the right surgery on the right body part, and that you are the patient who is supposed to be receiving that surgery.

You may think that adequate safeguards are in place to prevent surgical errors, but that’s a dangerous assumption. You must be alert from the time of operation prep. Advise your family member or friend to ensure their names, birth dates, and type of surgery are correct.

Also make sure that the body part to be operated on is correctly indicated, or if internal surgery is required, carry a piece of paper listing the name of the organ.

A big problem is that many surgeons only meet their patients in the OR. They are operating on a body, not on an individual they know. They may also be in a hurry and rushing never improved surgery.

Beckah Swan shares the story of her transition from clinical work to working in an LNC business. Her journey began when she had a nursing school professor who was also a lawyer. This woman mentored her in terms of a pathway to becoming an LNC.

When Beckah applied for a job in an LNC company, she felt inadequate in terms of non-nursing skills, for example, writing a report, but she was fortunate in receiving further mentoring and guidance in transitioning from personal injury cases to medical malpractice suits. She got thorough critiques of her reports and was gratified as her skills improved.

Among the aspects of working in an LNC firm that she most appreciated was being able to draw on the specialized knowledge of other nurses. She knows that this advanced her learning.

You may remember “ER,” the long-running medical soap opera. That show owed much of its popularity to the many dramatic scenes that showed ER staff swiftly and heroically trying to save lives.

You can get a taste of that excitement in this podcast. Nancy Stuck, legal nurse consultant, former “helicopter nurse” who rode with injured person, and now a busy emergency department nurse.

She vividly describes the countless things that can go wrong at an accident scene, including the onlookers who can create even more accidents. From there, she takes us to the ER, where medical personnel do their best to save the lives of multiple accident victims. Here, errors often occur.

Nancy breaks down the many possible errors. Speed of treatment, the correct code designation, correct documentation and that most important function, correct treatment, can lead to deviations from the standard of care.

Beckah Swan’s first-hand account of working as a critical care nurse during the height of the COVID crisis will give you a stark and dramatic portrait of the challenges and dangers nurses faced during this time. You will also get some invaluable information about causes of the medical errors that occurred.

After working in an LNC firm and gaining valuable training in that role, Beckah returned to the critical care environment in Nov 2020 and worked as a critical nurse until April 2022. She vividly describes the experience of wearing heavy and restrictive protective gear, a condition that made it difficult to achieve patient-nurse rapport.

As a traveling nurse, Beckah worked in many hospitals, all of them plagued by the lack of sufficiently trained critical-care nurses. For example, she describes situations where she had as many as four critically ill patients who should have benefited from a one-to-one treatment relationship. Neonatal and other nurses trained in specialties other than critical care were assigned to assist her, but they couldn’t perform many necessary medical functions.

While sleep problems can be particularly severe when a woman is going through menopause, sleep issues affect up to 70% of the world's population. That’s why the perspectives provided by Jane Butler, a registered nurse and now a health coach, can be so useful to those of us who struggle with these issues.

Joe Flores’ podcasts are among the most popular on this show. He brings to the conversation his experiences as a nurse, nurse practitioner, legal nurse consultant, and attorney. Through this multi-faceted lens, he makes connections that others can’t.

Joe provides some very specific guidance to nurse practitioners, recommending that they carry occurrence-based insurance. He also recommends that having an understanding of why NPs get sued can help them to avoid this happening.

As both an LNC and an attorney, Joe knows how lawyers think. LNCs should emphasize both that they can greatly facilitate an attorney’s ability to bring justice for his or her client, and that utilizing an LNC’s services can save both time and money. LNCs, because of their training in detailed analysis, can also uncover aspects of a case that an attorney won’t see.

He also shared his thoughts about the current state of nursing, pointing out that many people, especially people of color, who would like to enter the field of nursing, are unable to work their way through nursing school. Joe describes a nursing school in Texas which is addressing this issue by providing salaries for nursing students’ clinical work.

Probably the biggest challenge an LNC faces is marketing. They didn’t learn it in nursing school or in clinical practice. Too often, they decide to copy the marketing used by other LNCs, which leads to countless LNC websites that look and sound the same. They list their services and do nothing to differentiate themselves.

Because they are given no other options for making choices, attorneys will focus on price differences. This, says Chris Mahan, marketing expert, is how LNCs lose money and jeopardize their businesses. Instead, they need to address the pain points, needs, and fears that attorneys have and demonstrate how they can relieve those issues.

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We’ve all seen ambulances racing down the road with sirens screaming and lights flashing. Some of us have been emergency patients inside them. Most of us, though, don’t know what goes on inside these vehicles. For the LNC working on an EMS-related case, this knowledge is a necessity.

Here to give us a detailed look inside the world of emergency medical services is Nancy Stuck, an emergency department nurse, and expert fact witness. Nancy has worked both in ambulance and rescue helicopter settings.

Multiple decisions are made about how to respond to an emergency: method of transport, level of support, and many other options. An LNC needs to evaluate the treatment decisions that begin with the 911 call.

Unfortunately, accidents can also occur within the ambulance or helicopter, sometimes to the emergency personnel themselves. LNCs can find themselves evaluating these situations as well.

Many people prefer LinkedIn to other social media platforms. Lisa Wade, a legal nurse consultant, has found a unique way to make LinkedIn work for her.

When the pandemic dried up her LNC business, she got active in relevant groups on LinkedIn and enjoyed her involvement but found it not conducive to developing relationships. Switching gears, she formed her own group, the Attorney Medical Record Resource Group. Beginning by answering medical questions, she moved on to programming, interviewing members of the group on a weekly basis.

Lisa provides a detailed outline of how all this developed and specific details of how she interviews, records, and continues to search for new attorneys to join the group.

After missing out on two opportunities to refer expert witnesses, she formed Expert Witness Entrepreneurs. Here, among other activities, expert witnesses provide referrals for each other and network.

Lisa varies the format for both groups because it adds interest and sometimes technical crises cause her to find a creative way to overcome them.