There are few Black sexual assault nurse examiners. One university wants to change that.
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By Kate Martin, NBC News
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — The hospital where Sharita Godwin works in central North Carolina doesn’t have any Black nurses trained in administering forensic exams to sexual assault victims.
She’s aiming to become the first one.
Last week, Godwin joined seven other nurses from across the region at Fayetteville State University, as part of the historically Black school’s first class for aspiring sexual assault nurse examiners. The program, which took place over a couple of multiday sessions this fall, trained nurses to treat patients in crisis, including collecting forensic evidence for law enforcement and preventing sexually transmitted infections or pregnancy.
Godwin, an emergency room nurse at Betsy Johnson Hospital in Dunn, North Carolina, for the past eight years, said she wanted to become certified in sexual assault exams as a way of supporting some of the most vulnerable patients the hospital treats.
“It makes you feel a little bit more comfortable,” Godwin, 36, said of patients seeing a nurse who looks like them. “The patient might be more willing to open up.”
About 1 in 5 North Carolina residents are Black, according to census records, but nurses trained to treat sexual assault patients are overwhelmingly white, said Jennifer Pierce-Weeks, CEO of the International Association of Forensic Nursing, an industry group focused on training.
The training program at Fayetteville State was the first Pierce-Weeks had heard of at an HBCU, and she hopes to see more efforts to diversify the field of sexual assault nurse examiners.
Discover more about this program.
Check out this article about Black-owned birthing centers that aim to tackle this issue. Institutionalized racism that prevents people from entering certain careers can also prevent them from seeing the doctor.
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