How this guide is made

What the articles rest on

Three kinds of source, kept apart on every page.

• Court decisions. Published opinions from CourtListener. They are the only source allowed to support a claim about what a chart cost somebody, and each one is linked so you can read it yourself. The full list is in the index of decisions.
• Published guidance. Pages from professional bodies, regulators and insurers. A piece of advice counts only when the same advice appears on two unrelated sites. These are listed at the end of each article under “Official guidance” and “Other guides”.
• Forums. Used to learn which questions nurses actually ask and how they word them. Never used as a fact. Where a forum thread is quoted, it is marked as opinion.

Before an article goes up

A set of checks runs on every article, and failing any one of them sends the whole piece back:

• Every case cited has to be in the research file collected for that topic. A case that cannot be found there is not published.
• Every sentence quoted from a decision has to appear, character for character, in the text of that decision.
• Where only a search result was available and not the full opinion, the article may name and link the case but may not describe what the court decided.
• The ready-to-copy template has to use placeholders such as [DATE] and [NAME]. A template without them is sent back.

The same checks run again after the text is edited for readability. When no decision fits a topic, the article says so plainly, under “What this rests on”, instead of reaching for something close enough.

After it goes up

Every article is read after publication by the registered nurse who runs this site: ten years on a medical-surgical oncology unit, day shift. Anything that reads wrong for the floor is changed, and changes to substance are listed below.

Each article shows the date it was last updated, under its title.

What the guide is not

It is not legal or clinical advice. It describes what courts have already said about nursing records and how to write a clearer note. Your state board, your facility policy and, when it comes to it, a lawyer are what actually bind you.

Corrections

Mistakes that change what a page shows or says are listed here with the date they were fixed. Spotted one? Write to [email protected].

• October 5, 2026. In five articles, sample entries showed the text “<br>” where a line break belonged: correcting the record, copied notes, a note you already signed, late entries and a medication pulled but not given. Fixed.
• October 5, 2026. Twelve article titles had a capital letter in the middle of a sentence (“When the dose Isn't there to give”). Fixed.

The study guides work the same way with their textbook: where a sentence in the source was plainly wrong, it was left off the page rather than quoted.