I have read a number of first-time reports sent to me by new LNCs in need of mentoring. In the strictest sense, all of these reports were accurate representations of fact. In the literary sense, some were disasters.

When you compose a consultative report for an attorney, assume your reader is someone with no medical knowledge of the disease/injury/event/terminology. This is not true but it will help you write more clearly and avoid the use of medical abbreviations that are clear to healthcare personnel and no one else.

Many attorneys, particularly those who specialize in niche areas, are quite well informed about their client’s condition. Others make it their business to spend an inordinate amount of time researching the event around which their case revolves. Since they are quite bright, they can understand how a surgery should have proceeded, whether or not a delayed diagnosis made a difference in outcome, or why the ER screening for pulmonary embolus might cause harm to a patient in the throes of pulmonary edema.

But no matter how well informed, they probably do not know why elevated BNP with CP radiating to the LUE might be a sign of STEMI. Nor should they have to. We walk the fine line between not talking down to our attorney while not assuming an unrealistic level of knowledge.

The point I am getting to (finally) is that no matter how skilled a nurse is in her medical charting, that skill does not enhance report composition and in fact, gets in the way of effective report writing. Your report may be the only contact some attorney clients ever have because they are out of state or just in Midtown. I work with one attorney whose father was the editor for a national newspaper for 40 years. He avoided using LNCs “because they couldn’t write worth a damn” the few times he had worked with them. Regardless of their knowledge base, he could not respect professionals who had no knowledge of basic grammar and composition.