Nurse consulting is an emerging field, with more and more businesses understanding the value that a nurse consultant can bring. Nurse Consultants use their clinical background and education to provide medical information and medical advice to businesses. A Nurse Consultant may be considered a medical consultant or health consultant, but technically differs from these roles in that they provide services under their professional license.

A Nurse Consultant serves as a subject matter expert (SME) on healthcare issues and provides businesses with an excellent resource on healthcare-related issues or questions. Nurses have an understanding of complex medical concepts and experience with making those concepts understandable to anyone. This trait makes them ideal for assisting businesses in communicating with their audiences and for providing businesses with healthcare-related advice.

Qualifications of a Nurse Consultant

Technically, there are no qualifications for a Nurse Consultant beyond the requirement that they be a registered nurse or nurse practitioner who is licensed to practice nursing. While any nurse may begin consulting from a home office and call themselves a consultant, there are ways to find Nurse Consultants with experience and expertise.

Certifications

In addition to being licensed to practice nursing, there are additional professional certifications that a nurse can obtain. Certifications are issued by recognized professional entities and require a certain level of experience and knowledge to obtain. The testing for certification is rigorous, and certifications are a good indicator that the nurse with the certification is an expert healthcare professional in the area in which they are certified.

Certification should not be confused with a certificate. There are numerous businesses that issue certificates to nurses. These certificates are not regulated and are not typically recognized as adding value to a nurse’s experience. You can recognize if a nurse truly has a certification because certification is a professional credential. A nurse who has a certification will have initials after their name related to that certification.

Business Affiliations

There are businesses through which Nurse Consultants can be hired and provide their services. Nurse Consultants that are affiliated with a business have credentials and experience that has been reviewed and endorsed by that business. Every business has a slightly different standard of what they consider an expert consultant, but typically a Nurse Consultant affiliated with a business can be considered an SME in the area they consult in.

At Williams Healthcare Consulting we only hire and use expert Nurse Consultants who meet a strict criteria. Nurse Consultants at Williams Healthcare Consulting must have:

An unencumbered professional license as a registered nurse

At least a Bachelor’s level education

At least five years of hospital clinical experience

At least two years of subspecialty clinical experience

Eligibility for an advanced professional certification upon hire

A professional certification within one year of hire

These criteria separate our expert Nurse Consultants from a nurse who just decides to one day start calling themselves a consultant. Our criteria are some of the strictest in the industry and ensure that our clients have access to only the best available Nurse Consultants.

Roles of a Nurse Consultant

A Nurse Consultant’s role is to provide business consulting services to businesses with healthcare-related needs. The Nurse Consultant’s role must be within the scope of their professional license; any work requiring diagnosing or prescribing should be left to a doctor. While there are numerous roles that a Nurse Consultant can have in business, some of the more common roles include consulting in healthcare marketing, clinical processes, and medicolegal matters.

Marketing

Marketing is one of the major emerging areas for Nurse Consultants and involves everything from working as a small business marketing consultant to working as a consultant on large marketing campaigns for healthcare corporations. Areas of marketing in which Nurse Consultants are commonly used include:

hospital marketing

medical practice marketing

physician marketing

Nurse Consultants contribute to the marketing process by advising on an overall healthcare marketing strategy and by producing and verifying the accuracy of healthcare advertising. Medical marketing companies will use Nurse Consultants to ensure the accuracy of their content or to create new medical content, and Nurse Consultants are becoming an increasingly important asset to any healthcare marketing agency.

Nurse Consultants who work in marketing may produce content for healthcare articles, medical blogs, or medical websites. Medical marketing often includes developing health blog ideas and creating content for a healthcare blog. Medical blogging by a Nurse Consultant may be done as a ghost blogger, with the blog reviewed by and attributed to a particular doctor; this can be very helpful in marketing for doctors who do not have the time to blog for themselves. Healthcare blogging may also be attributed to the Nurse Consultant, using their credentials to promote the material as written by a trusted medical professional.

Clinical Advice

Nurse Consultants may be used as a business consultant for clinical processes or for medical questions that require advanced medical knowledge. The medical advice needed by businesses varies greatly based on the type of business and that business’s unique needs. The Nurse Consultants at Williams Healthcare Consulting have provided advice to a myriad of business types, from consulting on an automated external defibrillator (AED) program for a large financial corporation, to helping define medical job descriptions for a worldwide employment-related search engine, to writing phone scripts for a homecare agency.

The healthcare consulting done by a Nurse Consultant may be specifically for a clinical provider, such as a hospital or doctor’s office. This will typically require a Nurse Consultant who is experienced and specialized in a particular healthcare field, such as healthcare informatics.

Medicolegal

The medicolegal field has been using nurse consultants since 1980 and is perhaps the first area in which Nurse Consultants were ever used. Nurse Consultants who work in this specialty are called Legal Nurse Consultants (LNC’s) and work as a nurse paralegal. An LNC is different than a nurse attorney, who holds a law degree in addition to being a nurse. LNC’s work with attorneys and provide medical advice in legal cases. An LNC’s role may include:

Reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of malpractice or personal injury cases

Serving as a nurse expert witness during deposition and trial

Organizing and interpreting medical records

Identifying, screening, and facilitating review by expert witnesses

LNC’s may have professional certification specifically in the area of legal consulting and can provide much more value to a malpractice attorney than a normal paralegal would.

How to find a Nurse Consultant

Nurse Consultants are either independent consultants who advertise by themselves or consultants who work through reputable consulting companies. It can be difficult to find independent contractors due to the limited resources that they have for advertising, and most businesses find that the best way to find experienced and reputable Nurse Consultants is by working through healthcare consulting firms.

Williams Healthcare Consulting is unique as a company in that our core consulting staff are Nurse Consultants. Our expert Nurse Consultants have helped businesses across the country to find solutions to their healthcare-related problems and provided them with clinical expertise for their marketing campaigns, business operations, and medicolegal needs. If you would like to use the services of one of our expert Nurse Consultants, you can schedule a free phone consultation today*.



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