legal nurse education question

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Hi all, this is my first post here. :-) btw, this is such a great forum that I've utilized so much over the years for a variety of different issues- thank you! Now to my question....so I am interested in becoming a legal nurse consultant, and I would like to take some sort of training course as an intro to it. Since my employer will only assist with tuition at accredited colleges/universities that offer courses for credit, I cannot take any of the courses offered by private individuals (ie. Vickie Milazzo). Anyways, while in the midst of researching courses, I was wondering if I could just take a paralegal certificate course offered at a college instead of a formal legal nurse consultant program? I was having trouble finding legal nurse post-bac or post-master's certificate programs that were online, so I was wondering if a paralegal curriculum is similar in teaching the legal information (just without the nursing component)?

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Specializes in Physiology, CM, consulting, nsg edu, LNC, COB.

Legal nurse consultants have to know about the law but we are not responsible for its application! The attorney who retains a nurse consultant either as an inhouse reviewer to help interpret what's in medical and other care records and identify/vet medical testifying experts, or as a testifying expert in a nursing field, is responsible for all legal aspects of a case, including your work product if it is introduced into evidence. They hire us because of what we know about NURSING (and hospitals, medicine, and medical records, etc.), not law. Therefore a paralegal course will not be helpful in terms of being a legal nurse consultant per se (in and of itself). Some atty firms do not want to hire a nurse with a legal background, so it may even hinder your chances of ever acting in other as an uncredited back-office review position.

Further, being an atty is an all-consuming task. All the nurse I know went to law school discovered they could be lawyers or nurses, but not do justice to either if they tried to do both.

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Specializes in retired LTC.

HB  - the OP last visited 11/2/2019.

But interesting info still.

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