Archive for month: June, 2010

When I first started my legal nurse consulting business in 1982, I was nervous about contacting attorneys and marketing to them. The single most important thing that helped me overcome my fear was remembering who I was – an RN. You know my mantra, “We are nurses and we can do anything!®” If we can make split second decisions that are the difference between life and death, we can do something as easy as talk to an attorney. We learned early on as nurses that doctors are not to be feared and we learned to talk (back) to them. Well, attorneys are the same. They put their super-suits on just like everyone else, one leg at a time. Talk with them, they’re fun, they have great senses of humor and they love life. Some of the most fun people I’ve met in my life are attorneys.

Many of you will recognize that phrase from Vickie’s Wall Street Journal Bestseller Inside Every Woman. As a CLNC consultant you need to be agile. The same need extends to your computer accessories. Here’s something new. It’s the Targus 4-port USB Bend-a-Hub.

Purchasing any service or product is an emotional event. A customer buys not primarily to own the item or have the service, but to meet emotional needs: to seek comfort, reduce stress, fulfill social needs, achieve something significant, change status or lifestyle or even invest in the future.

I don’t know about your husband (or wife), but mine is a creature of habits. Some good, some bad and some just…

I have been asked whether CLNC consultants should encrypt the data on the computers they use for their legal nurse consulting businesses. My previous answer, if you remember, was an unequivocal “it depends.” It depends on your needs and on the sophistication of your computer skills. To that end, I suggested using some version of Microsoft’s “Bitlocker” program depending upon the operating system you may be running (Windows Vista Ultimate or Windows 7). If you were running XP or lesser versions of Vista, I suggested an add-on program called TrueCrypt, a free download, that will allow you to encrypt your entire hard drive or a portion thereof. These processes still work.

Nurses have the strength of renewal. You’re a healer. You renew and re-energize the patients you care for, physically and emotionally, turning them out healthier than they were before. You give and you give and you give all your energy to renew everyone else. But do you turn that strength around and apply it to you?

Okay, that’s a question that a lot of new Certified Legal Nurse Consultants might not know how to answer. In the world of digital media and MP3s, we no longer have to deal with skips in the middle of a song like we did when we listened to CDs or LPs. I’m so glad the days are gone that I have to worry about washing the lotion off my hands before handling my Prince CDs, or having to carefully slide an album like Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” vinyl album into its sleeve and then into the album cover at just the right angle to keep it from catching and scratching one of the tracks.

One of the first tools any CLNC consultant needs is an accurate way to keep track of billable hours and create invoices for attorney-clients.

The more you use your computer in your legal nurse consulting business, the higher the chance that one of your data types will become associated with a program other than the one you want to use to open it. What I mean by this is that your songs may start opening with Windows Media Player instead of your trusty iTunes. Your legal nurse consulting reports created in Word might start opening in Wordpad or your photos may open with some editor you downloaded from the Web instead of Photoshop Elements or Microsoft Office Picture Manager.

During my career as an ICU nurse, I was always looking for ways to better myself. I took and passed the CCRN exam, but to my dismay I received no recognition for this accomplishment. I tried management and found that I was working more hours and getting paid less than the nurses on my unit. Then something happened that changed my career. I tore a ligament in my hand while restraining a patient. I could no longer lift anything over 25 pounds. I was devastated. My ICU nursing career was over. I spent one and half years on light duty and was told that I had to find a different job or the hospital would settle with me. After months of searching, I landed a job in IT as a clinical analyst.