Expert Witness Blog

In Forensic Psychiatric Nursing — A Legal Affair: An Expert Interview With Angela Frederick Amar, PhD, RN, and Paul Thomas Clements, PhD, APRN-BC, CGS, DF-IAFN Medscape asks: What is forensic nursing?

Drs. Amar and Clements: Forensic nursing is nursing care with a legal component. Often times, this can mean that a crime has been committed and the client is involved with the criminal justice system as a victim, offender, or an involved family or significant other. Common practice situations include sexual assault, intimate partner violence, child maltreatment, death investigation, correctional nursing, forensic psychiatric nursing, legal nurse consultant, and forensic psychiatric liaison nursing.

Medscape: What is the state of the science for this specialty practice?

In The Second Coming Of Healthcare Insurance, managed care expert witness Stephen George, MBA-HA, writes on plan designs:

The good news is that the market is responding with plan designs that are affordable. These plan designs can be organized into two basic types of benefit packages: Scheduled Medical and Major Medical plans. Key elements that separate these plan types are sufficient Hospital, Wellness, Pharmacy, and provider network. The biggest difference is that Scheduled plans cost and cover much less medical care. Most of the latest Major Medical plan changes reduce coverage and increase out of pocket member costs. These plans include HRA, HSA, HDHP, CDHP, HMO, EPO and PPO plans, and shift this cost to employee by increasing deductibles, co payments, co insurance, and eliminating pharmacy, wellness, mental, vision, dental and, or out-of-contracted-plan care. By definition, Major Medical plans usually cover most catastrophic loss. This is not true for most Scheduled Medical Plans.

This reprint by permission of The Self-Insurer and The Self-Insurer’s Publishing Corp. as it appeared in the July, 2007 Edition

Collision analysis expert witnesses may opine regarding accident reconstruction, crashworthiness, collision analysis, and related topics. Here, the Accident Reconstruction Network reports:

General Motors Co is recalling 322,409 model year 2009 and 2010 Chevrolet Impala sedans because front seat belts may not be properly anchored, the automaker and federal regulators said on Friday. No injuries or fatalities have been reported in cases where the seat belts were not securely anchored or twisted, GM said in a letter to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

GM said it will begin asking its Impala customers later this month to bring the sedans to dealerships for inspection and repair if necessary, free of charge. Through mid-August, GM told NHTSA it had received 32 warranty reports of seat belts having separated from their anchorage.

In What is Accident Reconstruction? Dr. Alexander Zhukov, M. Eng., Ph.D., and accident reconstruction expert witness writes:

Accident Reconstruction is a scientific attempt to determine how a traffic accident occurred. It is a procedure by which the circumstances of a traffic collision are proven or estimated by working backward from the resulting damage and evidence. For example, the length of skidmarks, final resting positions of vehicles involved in the crash, and the amount of crush damage to the automobiles can be used to determine, or at least approximate, the speeds and/or directions of travel of the vehicles before the collision.

An Accident Reconstructionist is a person specially trained in using these procedures to determine the collision circumstances. The Reconstructionist is an expert witness usually retained by either the plaintiff or defendant in a lawsuit, who can be of great benefit in cases where fault for a collision is in dispute. Some police agencies have their own personnel trained in accident reconstruction who will be assigned to prepare independent reconstruction reports about particularly severe traffic collisions. Do not assume, however, that the police officer who prepared your accident report is a qualified expert. Most of the time, he is not.

In The Second Coming Of Healthcare Insurance, insurance expert witness Stephen George, MBA-HA, writes:

The business of health care has always been about financing predictable costs. America’s success has always been about her ability to adapt. Adapting to soaring insurance costs is expensive for consumers. In the past, insurance plans were far easier to understand. The market is responding like never before with affordable insurance, hybrid insurance and non-insurance discount plans. We have reached the price point where employers are abandoning benefits. Even large employers are feeling the pinch, but that pinch is a shove for individuals and small employers struggling to buy insurance. It’s not like you have to walk on water to understand these new plans, but praying for guidance is a good idea. Buyers take heed that your plan may exclude catastrophic loss.

This reprint by permission of The Self-Insurer and The Self-Insurer’s Publishing Corp. as it appeared in the July, 2007 Edition

Periodic payment judgments expert witnesses may opine on personal injury settlements, workers compensation case settlements, and wrongful death suit settlements, as well as related issues. A structured settlement may be defined as a court granted contract between a plaintiff as well as a defendant which pays off some amount of money to the plaintiff within regular payment scheme throughout a certain amount of time frame. What eventually may take place is, the person receiving the money, after a few years of repayments, chooses to get a lump sum payment to pay bills or simply to get some extra funds. And at this point, the structured settlement company comes into play. They will provide an agent who will buy the structured settlement contract with a slightly lower price in exchange for providing a large sum of cash at once.

Read more: zasst.com.

Structured settlement expert witnesses may opine on personal injury settlements, workers compensation case settlements, and wrongful death suit settlements, as well as related issues. A structured settlement may be defined as a court granted contract between a plaintiff as well as a defendant which pays off some amount of money to the plaintiff within regular payment scheme throughout a certain amount of time frame. These particular funds are usually to pay for health-related bills as well as the common expenditures of daily living. This normally occurs when there’s an injured party, and the whole process may include pre-trial court meetings and possibly a court hearing may be considered necessary.

Read more: zasst.com.

In Numerical methods with experimental soil response in predicting vibrations from dynamic sources, soil structure expert witness Mark Svinkin writes:

The suggested methods for predicting soil and building vibrations are founded on utilization of the impulse response functions technique for predicting complete vibration records on existing soils, buildings and equipment prior to installation of construction and industrial dynamic sources (Svinkin 1973, 1996). The impulse response function is an output signal of the system based on a single instantaneous impulse input (Bendat and Piersol 1993). These functions are applied for studies of complicated linear dynamic systems with unknown internal structures for which mathematical description is difficult or impossible. In the case under consideration, the dynamic system is the soil medium through which waves propagate outward from sources of construction and industrial vibrations. The input signal of the system is the impulse response of the ground at the place of pile driving, dynamic compaction of soil, or installation of a machine foundation; the output signal is the vibratory response of a location of interest situated on the surface or within the soil stratum, or any point at a building receiving vibrations. Output can be obtained, for example, as the vibration traces for displacements at locations of interest. Actually, these records are experimental Green’s functions.

In Numerical methods with experimental soil response in predicting vibrations from dynamic sources, soil expert witness Mark Svinkin writes:

Construction and industrial dynamic sources, such as pile driving and foundations for impact machines, generate elastic waves in soil which may adversely affect surrounding buildings and sensitive instruments (Targets). The effects of these waves range from visible structural damage to serious disturbance of working conditions for sensitive devices and people. Therefore, legitimate concerns frequently arise about possible ground and structure vibrations before the start of construction activities or installation of machine foundations.

Analytical methods (Miller and Pursey, 1954; Broers and Dieterman, 1992; Hanazato and Kishida, 1992; Wolf, 1994) already exist which give accurate results for certain limited cases, but these methods are applicable only to well defined and simple sites like a half-space or horizontally layered media. Indeed, for the prediction of expected vibrations, it is necessary to have information about the actual soil deposit and to choose a proper soil model to compute vibrations. Computed results from the simple models contain valuable data about general tendencies of wave propagation at a site, but cannot take into account spatial variations of soil properties and produce accurate and complete soil vibration records at any point of interest.