Category: Empowered Nurses

Recently I have had a number of clients come to me with issues regarding their licenses.  In every one of those cases, the reason why this was an issue with the client was because they were afraid to say “no!”  However, you can’t be effective with your patients unless you take care of yourself first.  Sometimes you just have to […]

According to the dictionary, a person is empowered if they have the authority or power to do something.  You might call to mind some of the famous people who were empowered, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. or Florence Nightingale; even Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela.  King’s peace movement spurred integration.  Nightingale founded the modern nursing school while Mandela and […]

People ask me why I went into law from nursing.  It is not a divine plan, I simply got divorced and had a great attorney and said to myself, “I can do this.”  But really, it is the best thing that I have ever done.  I get to combine two fields that I love and both involve taking care of […]

Last summer in Toledo, Ohio, Susan Fudacz was waiting for a kidney being donated by her younger brother, Paul Fudacz, Jr.  They were a perfect match and Susan was excited to get a new lease on life with her brother’s gift. When Susan woke from anesthesia, she noticed that she had no incision.  It turns out that a nurse mistakenly […]

When I started in nursing, I heard an expression:  “Nurses eat their young!” “Nurses eat their young!”  I could not believe it!  How could nurses eat their young?  What does this even mean? An interesting thing about the expression is that almost every nurse you talk to will know the saying.  I Googled the phrase and found that it is […]

In nursing school, they never taught us about the specific laws that we are required to follow to keep our license safe as a nurse.  They taught us about ethics.  I vaguely recall the Nurse Practice Act from which the most important advice from that is “Don’t have sex with a patient,” which I would not have done any way. […]

When I was a nurse, I did not want to share my thoughts on ways to improve patient care and now I realize I was not alone.  The Wall Street Journal recently published a study showing that 33% of nurses in a New York hospital said that they withheld ideas from their nursing supervisors.  Another 29% said that they “sometimes” withheld ideas […]

This is the end to a long drawn out saga. Many of you have read my previous articles that Anne Mitchel, R.N. and Vicki Galle, R.N. filed an anonymous complaint with the Texas Medical Board, complaining of a pattern of substandard care provided by a certain medical doctor, Dr. Rolando Arafilies. Both nurses were in performance improvement positions at Winkler […]

I am frequently asked by nurses how to protect their nursing licenses. Here are five simple things that a nurse can do, which many nurses told me they did not know, to protect her license. Notify the Board of any change of address. Notify the Board of all disciplinary action on your renewal application. Document on each employment application whether […]

Kimberly Hiatt had been a registered nurse for twenty five (25) years. She worked at Children’s Hospital in Seattle. Unfortunately, on September 14, 2010, she was taking care of a baby in the neonatal intensive care unit and accidently miscalculated the dose of Calcium chloride and gave the baby ten times the ordered dosage. Ms. Hiatt was escorted from the […]