How do you break free from traditional medicine to have the career of your dreams and still do what you love?
Well that is the question and the answer can be found here, on the Medical Entrepreneur podcast!
And in today’s episode, we are interviewing practice owner and expert witness Dana Standridge, on her story of how a nasty lawsuit sparked a new passion for her to help other medical professionals with their own practice.
She will be offering a ton of value today on how you can prepare for the worst case scenario, and outline practical steps on what you can do.
So without further ado, let’s get right into it!
How Dana got caught up in a lawsuit
So Dana was going to visit a surgeon that she actually didn’t normally work with.
She had called by her office to meet her and have a look at her facility. But before the procedure that led to the lawsuit took place, just two days before the case, the anesthesiologist who was supposed to do the case suddenly couldn’t do it.
So she asked Dana if she could come in and do the case, and Dana said yes.
There were a ton of things that played with her emotions to lead her to say yes. Firstly, it was a nurse who was having the procedure, so immediately that started to tug on her heartstrings, and just to add to it, the nurse was having it done before her wedding and honeymoon.
So even though she had never done this procedure on her before (but had done it before), Dana decided to say yes.
After the procedure…
So despite the fact that the patient survived and nothing went wrong, despite the fact that she delivered perfectly good anesthetic, Dana still got dragged into a lawsuit.
One of the very first things that Dana learnt during the lawsuit (and something you can apply for your practice), is that when practicing anesthesia, you must check the credentials of all the staff who are in the room at the time. And that is legally required by the AMA.
And I guess in the medical industry that’s not really something that’s talked about. We just assume that since we have the credentials to be there, that everyone else has the same thing.
And so Dana was made aware during her case that the nurse she gave her report to, was not in fact, a nurse.
She had been to nursing school, but never sat on any nursing boards nor did she actually have the license to.
The other thing which came after the lawsuit was that The Georgia Board of Nursing came after her and pursued a consent order against her.
Part of that consent order was that she failed to write a quantitative number for entitled CO2 via nasal canal. But as we all know, in practice, there is no quantitative number for entitled CO2, all we can do is write a plus sign.
And when I heard this from Dana, I couldn’t believe it. As we are all trained, to just write a plus sign instead of a quantitative number. But the State of Georgia decided to force this on her and make her admit that she did something wrong – when she just followed standard procedure.
They essentially made her sign a consent order since she ddn not write down the actual amount of entitled CO2.
How Dana made the switch to Expert Witness
After months and months of waking up with another trauma waiting to be dealt with, one day Dana was discussing things with her attorney.
One of her team members came to her and said, “You know, we think you’d be a really good person to have on our team as an expert witness to defend other CRNA’s.”
Once Dana heard the idea, she wasn’t sure. She was pretty burnt out by the whole episode to start to consider a new career path.
But after a little bit of convincing from her attorney, she took up a side hustle as an expert witness, and it instantly sparked a passion in her life.
But a big part of why Dana shares her story is to help raise awareness of the fact that these things happen everyday to normal people.
Just normal people who are going about their day-to-day life in their practice have to deal with this kind of thing. They get totally blindsided by it
Wrapping it up
So in conclusion, we hope you enjoyed today’s episode of Medical Entrepreneur, if you like it, please make sure to drop us a like, leave a comment and subscribe!
Additional Resources:
– Join my challenge here!
– Check out my website here!
– Sign up for our Aesthetics training here!
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Medical Entrepreneur is a podcast dedicated to those who are trying to escape mainstream medicine and start building the healthcare business of their dreams.
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