female nurse examiner comforts female victim of sexual assault

Social distancing requires most people to stay at home.

That doesn’t mean home is necessarily the safest place to be when one is confined with an abusive partner.

“Reports of domestic violence and sexual assault right now are going through the roof,” says Candace Burton, PhD, a researcher at the UCI Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing.

Nurse examiner shortage leads to unreported cases

There’s one big problem: There is a shortage of qualified Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANEs) or other forensic nurses in Orange County.

Each California county is legally required to have one sexual assault response team team for every 1 million people. Orange County has just one such team serving 3 million people.

Each team consists of a specially trained registered nurse and may also include hospital personnel, victim advocates, law enforcement, judges and other professionals.

Reporting assault a traumatizing experience

Unfortunately, the single team serving Orange County is not near UCI, Burton says. That face may make the decision to seek an examination difficult for some UCI-based survivors.

“You may have to be put in a police car and taken there. It’s potentially quite traumatizing.”

She notes that it can also feel very risky to undocumented individuals. “In the end, lot of people just don’t bother.”

That means a large number of cases are going unreported and forensic evidence doesn’t get collected. In 2017, only 450 examinations were performed in Orange County.

“That’s a shockingly small number, given the size of the population,” Burton says.

Training nurse examiners

Burton, along with Pat Patton, UCI Health’s Chief Nursing Officer, received a three-year, $1.2 million Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) grant. The 2018 grant will fund the training and recruitment of new SANEs to serve Orange County.

Because a majority of sexual assaults occur in those under 30, the project also aims to provide SANEs to serve the UCI student community.

So far, the program has enrolled about 30 nurse trainees, but due to precautions against the coronavirus, some trainings have been canceled or moved online.

The need is an urgent one and the need can’t be met soon enough, Burton says.

“We need more services, more access, because this is happening now.”