Legal Nurse Consulting: An Exciting Career Move

As a nurse, you already enjoy a certain amount of job security. You’ve probably heard about the national nursing shortage and know that nurses are expected to be in extremely high demand for the next decade.

However, just because nurses are in high demand doesn’t mean hospitals can always afford to pay them. With the dark cloud of the recession always present, over 50% of hospitals are losing money, according to the AHA’s March 2009 report. One health care provider in Wisconsin abruptly terminated 90 employees.

The silver lining in the cloud is that there are still plenty of niches within the field of nursing where your expertise and know-how are so invaluable that you’ll never go hungry. One of these niches is legal nurse consulting. According to Vicki Milazzo, owner of the popular Legal Nurse Consulting Blog, “The good thing about legal nurse consulting is that medical malpractice and personal injury litigation is recession proof. Now that we’re seeing financial stress on hospitals and doctors, I believe we’re going to start seeing more and more medical and nursing malpractice as well as the delivery of substandard healthcare.”

Of course, rock-solid job security on its own is not a compelling enough reason to make a ninety-degree career switch. That’s just the icing on the cake. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Are you stressed out and overtired? Is clinical nursing taking its toll?
• Do you want to help patients in a completely new way by helping to avoid the miscarriage of justice?
• Are you ready for new, exciting opportunities?
• Would you like to work from the comfort of home, or in an office outside of a traditional clinical setting?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may want to look into getting your Legal Nurse Consulting Certificate. What does a legal nurse consultant do exactly? As you can imagine, very few attorneys have any idea how to read medical records, let alone comprehend the terminology and subtleties of specific healthcare issues. When attorneys are working on cases that have to do with malpractice, workers compensation, personal injury or other healthcare related issues, they often call upon a legal nurse consultant to help fill in the gaps in their own knowledge. A good legal nurse consultant can make the difference between losing and winning a case—and ensure that justice is done and the patient’s interests are upheld.

For most legal nursing consultants, their job is their passion. And it’s not hard to understand why. The basic job description doesn’t begin to show just how satisfying, rewarding and exciting this profession can be.

“Every day is spent doing exactly what I want to be doing,” says one former RN who is now a legal nursing consultant. “I finally feel like I’m getting the professional respect I’ve sought my entire life. I’m not only being treated like an equal, I’m being treated as a tremendous asset. The attorneys need me and they respect my intelligence. They pump me up constantly. Gone are the days of the ‘toxic’ hospital environment.”

Around 50% of legal nurse consultants run their own business. Others choose to join the staff at a law firm, insurance company, or another legal institution. As a legal nurse consultant, you can look forward to charging around $70-200 an hour.

The best part is that your path from to becoming a certified legal nurse consultant is less tortuous than you might imagine. You don’t need to pursue an advanced degree or spend years in school; you can earn your Legal Nurse Consulting Certificate in less than a year from an online accredited institution. In a short time, you could be taking your nursing expertise to exciting new levels you never dreamed of.

Become a Legal Nurse Consultant Online
Earning your Legal Nurse Consulting Certification online allows working nurses the convenience of studying and doing their course work on their own schedule, any time of day, from any place they have computer access. Since you learn at your own pace, the amount of information retained from online courses is often greater. Since there`s travel involved, the cost of online learning is substantially less than learning similar materials in a traditional setting.

---

Legal Nurse Consulting Program Legal Nurse Consulting Forensic Nursing Certificate Accelerated Cert Legal Nurse Consulting Accelerated Cert Forensic Nursing Life Care Planning Certificatediv>

Top Nursing Schools College Network Indiana State University University of Phoenix Walden University South University

Related Articles:

Why Earn a Nursing Degree Online?
Legal Nurse Consultants Help Make the Case
What is Forensic Nursing?

Find More Articles About: Online Education, Financial Aid, Nursing Careers, Allied Health Careers, Healthcare Management Careers