Working As A Nurse? Here’s How To Properly Protect Your Rights

Most nurses are familiar with the rights of the patients, how to follow them, and to work hard in order to eliminate suffering and maintain human dignity. Nurses advocate on behalf of patients, families, the community, and society as a whole. The biggest problem is that most nurses are not familiar with their own legal rights and legal responsibilities as professional medical workers. An unpleasant situation about the nurse profession is a number of liabilities linked to the profession itself. However, there are means that can help protect nurses and their practice. Here are the ways to protect your legal rights.

Workplace Violence

When it comes to workplace violence, hospitals will forever remain at the very top of the most violated places. Medical workers are generally exposed to people with different diagnoses, like the ones abusing different substances, people suffering mental illnesses, intoxicated, and people with criminal reports. ER and hospitals are open to all people, and nurses end up being assaulted, not only by the patients, sometimes by the families under great emotional stress. In these situations, nurses must keep detailed records on the incidents and include information like date/ time/ and names of the people included in the accident. Nowadays, nurses are working in understaffed hospitals and are more likely to suffer some kind of liability due to job overload. It is the smartest way to have an attorney guarding your legal rights as a nurse because you can get yourself in a situation without knowing it. It is not a rare case for nurses to suffer injuries during the intervention. This is the reason why having a lawyer specialized in these cases such as a hospital worker and nurse injury lawyer in Albany is the smartest way to avoid unpleasant situations. Additionally, none of the nurses can afford the loss of license. If you want your job and dignity protected, you must think of legal representation.

Be Responsible to Your Patients, not Hospital

Even though this comes off crude and harsh, it is true that you are responsible and you advocate for your patients, community, and not the hospital. Nurses serve people and are responsible for the patient from the minute he or she is admitted to the hospital. It is a critical situation for the people who have no insurance and cannot be treated in the hospital nor receive Medicare. This is a kind of discrimination present in the community for the elderly people who lose their insurance once they are 70 or 80 years old. This is why patient advocacy is extremely important. You basically protect both yourself and your patients.

Attorney

Although you should spend some time studying and understanding the rights nurses have. It is most important to figure out if you need someone to explain to you from the professional point of view through the practice or to have someone represent you and guard your legal nurse rights. You can get acquainted with the basic information from the state nurse practice act, but this is not enough since the situation on the field is much different and a lot of evidence is taken into consideration. This is why keeping a detailed report in your defense is crucial. You can spend all of your time studying legal rights in order to avoid the situations where you can be framed or face some kind of liability and still get yourself into trouble without noticing. Still, if this happens, you need to have a professional in the field you are having trouble with.

If you are facing license disciplinary action, then you will have to have an attorney who is specialized in license defense. If you are having a problem with employment issues, federal and local laws on wages, overtime, and discrimination. Then you should have an attorney dealing with these issues. The laws of the nurses act considerably vary based on the region and state. So if you get fired for saying your opinion you will need a constitutional representative. If you refuse to draw blood from the unconscious or in that moment a dangerous patient, then you will need a criminal attorney. If you want to insure yourself for the time being you can get yourself license defense coverage, which can be bought within the nursing associations and is an affordable and prudent option.

It is extremely important to know all of your nurse’s legal rights and not to settle for the things which will put at risk your license and profession. Nurses stand for the patients and community, not for the hospitals.