Fayetteville Today

This week, Fayetteville State University launched a program to train nurses to take better care of those who have been sexually assaulted.

The Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) program is designed to teach health care providers to help victims recover from assaults psychologically and physically. SANE students will learn how to collect forensic medical evidence while providing compassionate, trauma-informed care for sexual assault victims.

"This is a real crisis here in the timeliness of follow-up, of having the right leaders by the bedside, … also be able to address this backlog that we have that stretches over to the Attorney General's Office,” Darrell Allison, chancellor of Fayetteville State University, said in a WTVD report this week. 

The state of North Carolina granted Fayetteville State $1.5 million to start the training program, WTVD reported. Developing the curriculum has been a two-year effort. Fayetteville State competed for the grant and is the first historically Black college to host such a program.

"What we are trying to do is have a statewide initiative for increasing the supply and distribution of sexual assault nurse examiners throughout the state of North Carolina,” Sheila Cannon, associate dean of the FSU Nursing School, told WTVD. "Because of how we sit at FSU, because we are diverse in population, we have the capability to not only reach students in our program but also students across the state." 

Cannon found that there were only approximately 60 certified sexual assault nurse examiners in the state, with only seven of North Carolina's 18 counties in the southeast part of the state having one of those nurses.

"I think what's so important, too, is that there are not that many African American sexual assault nurses as well,” she said. “To have someone at the bedside that looks like them, they're much more likely to be open in their care." 

Approximately 30 students are enrolled in the 12-day program for the spring semester, and officials hope to train approximately 80 students by the end of 2023, the university said in the report.