Legal tips you need to know for safe nursing practice

1. Legal tips you need to know for safe nursing practice
© CureMD Healthcare

2. Nursing
• Nursing includes a variety of specialties and
definitions that usually differs from one country to
another
• Broadly defined, a nurse is a person who is formally
trained to take care of the sick and the disabled
• Nursing standards today are in accordance to the
latest scientific information from the literature, state
and federal laws, court decisions, nurse practice acts
• The Joint commission, the ANA organizations and
other organizations offering special certifications,
procedures and policies as well as job descriptions

3. Tips to safe nursing practice
• Properly administrating medications
– This includes knowing a drug’s purpose and action,
knowing the appropriate dosage, understanding
administration routes and being ready for a possible
contraindications and adverse reactions
– Traditionally, the five thumbs-up rules include right
patients, right med, right dose, right time and right route
– A nurse is usually the last access before a patient takes on
drugs. Hence it is crucial for them to catch possible errors
by a pharmacist or physician
– Such errors could occur due to the use of illegible
penmanship, banned abbreviations, clarification failures or
transcription errors

4. Tips to safe nursing practice
• Check for and identify deterioration
– Per safe nursing standards, it is crucial to access your
patient continually
– Lots of legal actions taken against nurses are owing to the
allegations of failure to check or find new changes in a
patient’s health conditions
– This act of failure is popularly known as ‘failure to rescue’.
So, any small change in the patient’s health is to be
reported immediately to the physician

5. Tips to safe nursing practice
• Effective communication
– When transferring the patient’s condition to another
individual, (possibly a patient’s relative or friend or the
patient itself) effective and educative communication is
very important
– Your listening skills ought to be sharp as well
– Patients with limited proficiency of your preferred
language must be offered interpreters
– This is very much part of the standard care in the nursing
law books

6. Tips to safe nursing practice
• Assign responsibilities
– Nurses must assign responsibilities appropriately and also
supervise people carrying out assignments
– So that calls for leadership skills like knowing who has the
best competencies and skills to meet patient requirements
– It would be smart to delegate tasks that are frequently
recurring, with standard procedures, minimum changes,
predictable results and minimum risks

7. Tips to safe nursing practice
• Preparing documents that are time-based and
accurate
– These are equally crucial as they can be utilized as possible
evidence for legal proceedings or determine whether or
not a medical care delivered meets the legal care
standards
• Knowing and following facility procedures and
policies
– The pre-defined policies and procedures for any medical
case must be updated on a regular basis
– These policies and procedures of your facilities are the
base or standards for which you can be legally held in a
court

8. Tips to safe nursing practice
• Using all equipments appropriately
– Ensure you are properly trained on the equipment to be
used. Else, it could lead to disaster
– Today, with technology growing steady and fast day by day,
technology in hospitals are increasing big time
– This scenario is only going to increase in the future. Hence
a sound knowledge on some of these or all these
equipments is an increasing must

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