A 2020 survey found that 81% of registered nurses in the U.S. were white and just 6.7% were Black, according to the Journal of Nursing Regulation.
Dr. Sheila Cannon, associate dean of the school of nursing at Fayetteville State, organized the recent training with funding from the state Legislature.
That $1.5 million appropriation for Fayetteville State came on the heels of a news report last year that showed few sexual assault nurse examiners worked in rural North Carolina hospitals, which meant some patients had to travel hours from home or wait days for care.
The reporting spurred a flurry of action at the state and federal level to pay for training and supporting sexual assault nurse examiners. Congress approved $30 million per year for the next eight years for this work, and Cannon hopes to secure some of the federal funds to expand the program.
It was a struggle to get this program to Fayetteville State University at all. Cannon had tried to secure a federal grant, but lost out to schools with more resources or their own hospital, like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Training is typically offered at a few hospitals or universities and can cost hundreds of dollars.
Cannon, who is Black, said that before she worked at Fayetteville State she was a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, and some of her psychotherapy patients were victims of sexual abuse or molestation.
“I know the impact of trauma is lifelong,” Cannon said. “You sustain such a level of trauma that you really need supportive intervention from the very beginning. You need someone there advocating for you, someone giving you compassionate care.”
Last week’s hands-on course, which was free thanks to the legislature’s funding, aimed to help the nurses feel more comfortable treating sexual assault patients.
On the first day of clinical training, the students practiced what they had learned in the classroom by doing exams on forensic teaching associates, who served as both models and teachers as the nurses asked them for consent to collect evidence from their bodies, look for injuries and practice speculum insertions. An exam can take up to six hours — and perhaps double that if a nurse isn’t trained and is reading the instructions of a rape kit for the first time.
Although Godwin knew it was an exercise, she was still nervous to get started.
“Are we doing this now?” she whispered to Beth Andrews-Arce, her co-worker at Betsy Johnson Hospital, as they stood on one side of a thin curtain separating them from a forensic teaching associate who was acting the part of an assault victim waiting for care.
Andrews-Arce nodded and picked up a clipboard. Godwin pushed the curtain aside, sat down on a nearby stool and introduced herself to the woman. She tried to get a sense of what happened to her. The answers to those questions would help guide the exam toward DNA that may have been left behind by an attacker. Godwin paused occasionally to ask questions of her instructor.
Afterward, Godwin said the training helped her have more confidence in doing the exams.
“I want to learn my script of how I move through things so I can be more efficient and the patient can feel more comfortable and confident in what I’m doing,” Godwin said.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
