LNCtips.com: Touch Charts and Calendars

Calendars and Touch Charts are two types of work product that legal nurse consultants can produce for attorneys.

Touch Charts

Allegations that staff failed to attend to the patient or nursing home resident over a specific period of time are common not only in medical malpractice and nursing home neglect cases but also in cases alleging inadequate staffing.  Touch charts are graphic representations of the number and type of health care providers that rendered care to a patient or resident over a defined period of time.

The time frame for a touch chart can be developed for periods ranging from a few minutes to months. Because touch charts are time specific, the information is often presented in a clock, calendar or day planner format.  Legal Nurse Consultants can create basic reports and, if the attorney chooses, a graphics company can further enhance the report for use as a trial board or for inclusion in a PowerPoint presentation. The sample touch chart was used to refute claims by the family that the patient was not coded and was only treated by one nurse in the last few minutes of her life.

Calendars

Touch charts are often presented in calendar form but calendars are also useful to demonstrate non-compliance.  The sample Medication Compliance Calendar was created for a defendant to demonstrate that the plaintiff failed to fill the prescriptions that were needed to treat his condition.  The calendar was created using an Excel template for use as a trial board.  Even from a distance, it's easy to determine that the plaintiff filled his prescriptions only three times during the year when they should have been filled 12 times.

...Katy Jones