Aline Jordan, Legal Nurse Consultant
Aline Jordan received her nursing degree from the University of Texas in 1979. She then began working in Labor and Delivery at Brackenridge, a Level 3 teaching facility in Austin. Over the ensuing 7 years, she became charge nurse on the night shift as well as participated in the creation of policies and procedures and inhouse inservices. Her next move was to the Regional Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Seton Hospital where she learned how to deliver care to the sickest of newborns. She followed two of her primary care babies home over the next few years, providing them with in home pediatric care.
Not interested in returning to hospital nursing, she began looking around for something that would offer intellectual challenges as well as build on her experiences. The advertisement for a law firm needing the services of an obstetrical nurse was too strange to pass up. She began working as a medical nurse legal consultant in 1990 and continues in that position today.
Although she has spent most of her time investigating birth related injuries over those 19 years, she has also participated in claims involving adult injuries, environmental toxic torts, pharmaceutical cases and even a few criminal forensic cases. Her time in the office is spent on medical research, collaboration with medical experts and attorneys, teaching attorneys when necessary, investigation of defense experts as to their credibility and preparation of exhibits and strategies for trial. She has assisted attorneys in responding successfully to Daubert challenges and has been instrumental in helping attorneys eliminate certain defense experts by having them stricken by the court or withdrawn by the defense. Known for her outrageous sense of humor, amazing analytical abilities, progressive political beliefs and unwillingness to give up endless battle for improving all things unfair, unsafe, negligent, mean or just ignorant, Aline is a sharp ally for patients’ interests.
To Aline, this work represents the ultimate in patient advocacy, every nurses’ primary responsibility. She has assisted Mueller Law and other law firms who represent babies and their families to present information to the FDA on vacuum extractors, which led to the issuance of the FDA alert to health care providers and finally to the obstetrical community to recognizing the dangers associated with their use and changing practice. She currently has other projects underway, in collaboration with medical experts and other plaintiff law firms, which she hopes will force the obstetrical community to recognize their responsibility to the families they serve and curtail current unsafe practice. These include research into the practice of elective inductions with no medical purpose other than the convenience of the physician, the cavalier use of Cytotec and Pitocin with their consequent dangers of hyperstimulation, prolonged pushing and subsequent mechanical ischemic brain injury. She still hopes that the medical community will more completely join in promoting safe obstetrical practice based on scientific evidence, common sense and outreach.
When not engaged in the above projects, she enjoys gardening, mosaics, reading anything but scientific literature and playing with her five grandchildren.
