INDIANAPOLIS — IU Health Foundation and IU School of Nursing have received a $1.39 million grant to help train more nurses who work with victims of sexual assault.
Sexual assault nurse examiners, or "SANE," are forensic nurses who perform exams if someone has been attacked.
The IU Health system says 1 in 5 women have been sexually assaulted in Indiana. The program is meant to train more nurses to get them on the job. In order to become a SANE nurse, you need to have two years of being a registered nurse.
IU also says there are only three counties in the state that have a 24/7 SANE nurse in house. The other counties either don't have one at all or hospitals have someone that is on-call, but not available 24/7 in-house.
"It's getting the awareness out there that forensic nursing is an area that you can go into. They need support for their hospital in developing a forensic nurse program and how to manage it. Part of our program that we plan for the HRSA grant is to help these smaller hospitals start up a forensic program," said Natalie Calow, SANE Nurse at IU Health.
She said sometimes survivors of attacks need to drive hours to get to a place where there is a SANE nurse to perform an examination.
"Sometimes they don't even make it here, because they're traumatized from what just happened to them that then they say at first that they want to come up here, but who wants to drive two hours when something traumatic just happened to them?" said Calow.
