Changes coming to ER response to sexual assault on P.E.I.
Health PEI says it's aiming to improve the way sexual assault victims are cared for and examined at emergency departments on the Island.
The agency says it's in the process of training all ER nurses on how to properly examine and collect forensic evidence from patients who've been sexually assaulted, if they decide to pursue charges.
As it stands, only physicians or the province's few highly trained sexual assault nurse examiners do that work.
"This will free up our physicians to see other patients. So hopefully that will improve wait times for other things," said Mike MacDonald, ER nurse manager at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
"But also nurses are very in tune to patients needs, and the compassionate side of things. So I feel that piece will be enhanced with nurse involvement in sexual assault."
'They haven't been treated respectfully'
Sigrid Rolfe, the coordinator of P.E.I.'s Rape and Sexual Assault Centre, is one of the advocates who has been pushing for and helping to coordinate the nurse training.
"I think the ultimate goal is to provide respectful and timely services for survivors who to go hospital, and sometimes that hasn't been the situation," Rolfe said. "We've often heard from survivors who've felt they haven't been treated respectfully...and there seems to be a general feeling out there that prevents people from seeking help."
Rolfe says one complaint she's heard is that physicians examining sexual assault victims are too often called away to see other patients, which she says "stalls the whole process, and a survivor is left waiting for [the examination] to be completed."
Health PEI says nurses will be better positioned to stay with victims through the entire process.
Online seminar
The agency says the training — an online seminar course developed by a doctor in Alberta — also addresses how to properly meet the emotional and psychological needs of sexual assault victims.
"Part of the training is to become aware that there's no right way a victim should be behaving after an assault, and to understand there's a variety of reactions," said Rolfe. "We need to be very careful about judging victims' behaviour. That part's really important."
MacDonald says over the past year, about 40 per cent of the QEH's 75 ER nursing staff have gone through the training. He says staff at Prince County Hospital and Western Hospital are also receiving it.
But MacDonald says before nurses actually start doing more work with sexual assault victims, Health PEI needs to find a way to give nurses more hands-on experience.
"We have to come up with a way that nurses can practice doing some of those things around evidence collection, because it has to be very specific when you're dealing with forensic evidence," MacDonald said. "So that's a piece we're trying to work on and design and try to improve so nurses are comfortable going into the room and doing these procedures."
MacDonald says in an average year Island emergency departments deal with just 10 to 20 cases of sexual assault victims who want to pursue charges and have forensic evidence collected.
Rolfe expects those numbers will increase once nurses start doing more of the work.
"What I hope is that if the public is aware that efforts have been made to enhance the kind of response they might get, if they go to emergency after an assault, that we'll see more people coming forward," she said.
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