ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 3, 1996 TAG: 9612030063
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEWPORT NEWS
SOURCE: Associated Press
A program instituted Sunday at Riverside Regional Medical Center is designed to improve the treatment rape victims receive, partly by not making them wait hours for an examination.
Developed in Texas, the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners, or SANE, program trains nurses to provide fast but thorough examinations of rape victims. So far, three nurses at Riverside have been trained to provide SANE care.
``Before the program, if a rape victim came in, they would have to wait until a nurse got free, and they would have to wait for a doctor to get free,'' said Mary Edwards, one of Riverside's SANE nurses. ``Some rape victims were looking at five, six, seven hours just waiting to be examined.
``If you have just been raped, you just want to be examined, get it over with and get in the shower,'' she said.
The SANE nurses will do complete examinations of rape victims within one hour of their arrival at the emergency room, Edwards said. They also will be available as forensic witnesses at trial.
The training for SANE involved 40 hours in the classroom and 40 hours of clinical work at Fairfax Hospital. The Northern Virginia hospital was home to the first program of its kind in the eastern United States.
Sue Brown, coordinator of the program at Fairfax Hospital, said the training also includes lectures by rape victims, forensic experts and rape experts from local and federal law enforcement agencies.
``From the victims' standpoint, these exams are human,'' Brown said. ``Many of the people said that, before the SANE program, it was like getting raped once by the rapist and then by the system.''
The program also helped law enforcement officials do their jobs better, Brown said, providing evidence both to convict and to exonerate suspects.
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