When you think of malpractice insurance, you probably think of doctors surgeons and other medical professionals. What about nurses? Should they have nursing malpractice insurance? Nurses do a lot to help the doctors, so should they be covered? The answers seem to be working more and more towards yes!
Nurses need all of the same protections that doctors do. Even as a nurse who works in the OR, they need to be prepped just like doctors do. They need to scrub in and get dressed to operate on a person. Same thing with examinations. They need to make sure their hands are clean and look at your chart to sure you’re getting the right medicine.
With the increase of nurses doing a lot of the work, getting vitals, reading paperwork and other things, it only makes sense that they need nursing malpractice insurance.The nurses pick up on the important details. They should be covered by malpractice insurance also.
They say that there is a nursing shortage in our country, but it heavily depends on the area. Some have just finished school and already have jobs, but some graduates are hard pressed to find a single job. People need and want to be taken care of. Nurses can do that.
You know the saying that behind every good man, there is a good woman? Well it’s true, and it can be said of doctors as well. Behind every good doctor, is a good nurse. I know on a recent visit to my doctor the nurse caught something that the doctor did not, and that was why I had the exams and tests I needed to be diagnosed correctly. A lot of the vital signs in hospitals are taken by nurses.
Have you ever heard of a TV show on the Discovery Health channel called Mystery Diagnosis? These are people who for months or even years, are misdiagnosed and doctors can’t figure them out to treat the disease or condition they have. It often takes a specialist to do so. Doctors may know a lot, but doctors don’t know everything.
Depending on the type of doctor you have (and there’s a lot of them you can have) they aren’t well versed in every specialty there is. A regular doctor, also called a GP or a general practitioner, isn’t going to know as much as a cardiologist. An OB/GYN isn’t going to know the same things as a kidney specialist, not by a long shot. Now, it’s true they all go through the same training to become doctors, but that is where the similarities end. They don’t know everything, and most, except a very few, admit it. So doctors can mess up. They can give the wrong instructions or wrong medication accidentally. They are only human.
For nurses, it is the same thing. They know a lot of the same things doctors know, but just like doctors, they can specialize in a few different fields. There are nurse-midwives, there are cardiac nurses and other fields like that. Nurses can mess up, they don’t know everything. I don’t know of a single nurse that can say otherwise. This is a perfect reason why they should offer nursing malpractice insurance. I wouldn’t say it can’t happen to you because it can and will, if you’re not careful. We salute nurses and all you do to take care of us. It is a hard job and you made a commitment. It is great you chose to help us out, even if that means you are tired and want to go home. You are needed indeed.