Learning from Medical Malpractice Claims Involving Nurse Practitioners to Improve Practice

Medical providers prefer to learn from the mistakes of others, not their own. As professionals, we will do everything possible to avoid them - but we must know when something goes wrong and why. We need to hear the story. Learning from medical errors in healthcare is critical to improving patient safety. Being involved in the legal side of malpractice case work allows the speaker to be transparent but discreet avoiding blame and shame. Stories have greater impact and are best remembered as this presentation will have many cases to share “What happened,” “Why it happened” and “How to keep it from happening again.”

As health care providers our most egregious mistakes become medical malpractice lawsuits. The least defensible of these are settled pre-trial. The stories of these settlements are a rich source for learning but because they routinely contain confidentiality or non-disclosure clauses resulting in these learnings not being shared.
 
In this webinar many of these cases will be presented for learning purposes. Stories of settled lawsuits are powerful, attention-grabbing, and memorable. Bringing greater transparency to these settlements is a unique opportunity to link the prevention of future patient harm to equip the nurse practitioner to fulfill their role of healing without fear and risk of liability. This presentation will review the most common fact patterns in nurse practitioner-related lawsuits that arise repeatedly in malpractice cases involving patients presenting to the emergency department, ambulatory care clinics, and inpatient settings. Case examples from many high-risk areas including sepsis, opioid overdose, orthopedic injuries/emergencies, and missed cancer diagnoses will be used to allow the participant to apply newly learned concepts to practice.

Webinar Objectives

By attending this webinar the participant will be able to:

• Identify how malpractice cases are litigated and settle pre-trial
• Recognize areas of risk for malpractice claims for their practice
• Identify common fact patterns in nurse practitioner-related lawsuits and apply knowledge to case examples to transfer learning to their own daily practice

Webinar Agenda

• What is the current state of NP medical malpractice and what the data is telling us?
• How patient harm moves to litigation and how claims are settles
• Case examples sharing learned strategies of how to avoid the same thing happening to the NP

Webinar Highlights

• Why do patients sue?
• Basics of Litigation
• How adverse outcomes and patient harm move to ligation
• How claims are settled
• National Practitioner Data Bank and how you are entered into it
• CNA/NSO Practitioner Report data is telling us
• Diagnosis related allegations and multiple case examples
• Strategies for the NP to avoid claims with each case example

Who Should Attend

Nurses, Nurse Practitioners, and Physician Assistants in outpatient and inpatient health care settings