Law and the ED nurse. Emergency nursing: standards of care.

Abstract

A s emergency nursing continues to gain increasing recognition as a nursing specialty with certification examinations, emergency nurses can expect that there will be increasing pressure on hospitals to staff their emergency departments with nurses who have the skills and credentials to practice this demanding specialty. With the advent of emergency nursing certification, nurses who practice emergency nursing are concerned with the effect that certification may have in the context of emergency nursing malpractice suits. What legal standards are used to determine whether nursing care rendered by an emergency nurse is or is not negligent? In any nursing malpractice case, a critical question is whether the defendant nurse deviated from accepted standards of care and, if so, whether the patient suffered harm as a result. Generally, the law requires a nurse to exercise that degree of knowledge, care, and skill ordinarily possessed and exercised in similar situations by the average member of the nursing profession. Nurses who are certified in a specialty will be held to the accepted national standards of that specialty. Certified emergency nurses (CENs) can reasonably expect to be held accountable to the (CEN) standards of care promulgated by the Emergency Department Nurses Association. Those nurses who practice emergency nursing but who are not certified in emergency nursing will in all likelihood be increasingly held accountable to the standards of CENs. Courts are likely to reason that the nurse who exceeds the usual bounds of nursing practice, and who holds herself or himself out as capable of providing nursing services that fall within the realm of a specialty, should be held to the same standards of care as a nurse who has devoted full attention to that specialty.