 |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Your First Role as a CLNC® – Defining Your Role by Vickie L. Milazzo, RN, MSN, JD Many nurses who come through our courses want attorneys to tell them what the attorney expects a legal nurse consultant to do. These nurses want attorneys to define their role for them and tell them what services they should provide. On the surface, this might seem quite logical, but the truth is, when one professional hires another professional as a consultant, the hiring professional may not really know what the consultant can do for her. In working with attorney-clients, my experience has been that the attorney-client often does not know what she needs, nor does she grasp the full scope of services (see 32 Services You Provide) the CLNC® can provide. This is especially true if the attorney has never worked with a nurse before or has only worked with nurses in a limited way. It's part of our job as CLNC®s to educate attorneys about what we're able to do. To do less than this is unprofessional. More importantly, it robs our clients of opportunities to benefit from our full range of services and robs us of opportunities to prosper by providing those services. As CLNC®s, we must take charge of our client relationships and define our ROLE, just like every other professional group does. You would not hire a CPA who expected you to define the role of the CPA or to train her. Nor would you hire a designer, architect, copy editor or other professional who didn't know what you expected of her or what she should be capable of doing. A CPA, architect, etc., who expected her clients to provide this information would not be considered a professional. She would be unlikely to pass the stringent certification requirements set up by most professions, and she certainly wouldn't be likely to succeed in establishing a thriving practice. If you decide to computerize your office, you may have an idea of what you want or need, but the truth is you may know very little about what computer technology has to offer and how it can enhance your practice. Only a computer specialist will be able to show you the equipment and software that will best suit your current needs and your plans for growth. A computer consultant who depended on his clients to tell him what they needed would fall far short of providing those clients with thorough or even competent service. As legal nurse consultants we should expect as much of ourselves as CPAs, architects, computer specialists and the numerous other professional groups in the business world today. Each professional group defines its own role and trains its own professionals – otherwise that group is not considered a profession at all. It is not even a trade. People who do not take responsibility for their own performance, standards and training are usually relegated to roles as assistants or helpers. They are simply not qualified to be considered professional consultants. It is never the job of one professional group to train another. Just think what nursing practice would be like if doctors trained nurses and determined their roles! The truth is, attorneys wouldn't know how to train legal nurse consultants, even if they desired to. If CLNC®s want to make inroads into the thousands of law firms that could benefit from our services, we must take on the responsibility of defining our role and clearly showing our prospective clients what we can do for them. Let's take charge of who we are and the services we provide, or we can forget about being professionals. |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tell a Friend About This Site