MILWAUKEE — A new program at UWM is training nurses to become sexual assault nurse examiners (SANE nurses). The first round of the program launched two weeks ago with 10 students.
One of the inaugural students is Kristine Radtke Norris.
"It's a passion of mine and it's an area that's so desperately needed in the community," Radtke Norris said.
She said her passion lies in making sure survivors of sexual assault have a safe place to land.
"They can decide to collect evidence or not. They can just make the decision of am I safe? Is my body going to physically be ok?" she said.
And it's the passion of students to serve patients at one of their most vulnerable moments that Nurse Jacqueline Callari Robinson hoped for when dreaming of this program.
"I want to see that in every student we train. That they have an understanding and a level of empathy for every survivor. That every survivor can go home and get up the next morning. And just get up out of bed the next morning feeling heard," Robinson said emotionally.
Robinson has been doing the work for nearly three decades as a certified SANE nurse. She calls it "a completely different way of providing care."
A 2020 Wisconsin DHS report reveals about 1.2 million adults in our state have experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes. And according to UWM, there are fewer than 100 sexual assault nurse examiners in Wisconsin. So there's a tremendous need for trained professionals to provide this care.
"They provide trauma-informed care,' Robinson said. "When you're not trained, you don't really know what to look for. You don't know what that crisis intervention looks like."
Robinson took the need for providers as an opportunity and teamed up with UWM to train nurses in the field.
Professor Penninah Kako is the project director.
"If [patients] see a nurse who is trained this way, the nurse can actually provide comprehensive care to the patients. And that's where we really are filling a gap," Kako said.
And the program goes further than just training students how to do the examination. There's a focus on communities of color and the LGBTQ community which are disproportionately impacted by sexual violence.
"We are also adding another layer of culturally safe," Kako said about the training in the program. "Thinking about the populations that have been on the margins, that are highly impacted by sexual assault."
Although there are only 10 students in this first cohort, the program hopes to expand to 20 in the fall and another 20 in the spring.
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