With Care and Compassion

Abstract

In this study, we conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 20 adolescent sexual assault patients aged 14-17 years who sought postassault medical forensic examinations at one of two Midwestern Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner programs. Our goals were to examine how adolescent victims characterized the quality of the emotional/interpersonal care they received and to identify specific aspects of Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner nursing practice that were helpful and healing. Overall, the patients had very positive experiences with both programs. The nurses were sensitive to their patients' physical and emotional needs throughout the examination. The adolescents also noted that the nurses were compassionate, caring, and personable. Finally, the survivors deeply appreciated that the nurses believed and validated their accounts of the assault. These findings suggest that compassionate care must be developmentally informed, such that basic patient-centered practices (e.g., belief and validation) are age sensitive and age appropriate.

The identification and treatment of mental health and substance misuse problems in sexual assault services: A systematic review

“…Of the 107 papers included in the review, some were relevant to more than one of our three review questions. For review question one, we included 78 publications providing information on how sexual assault services address mental health and substance misuse [20, 24-26, 33-106]; for review question two, we included 6 papers of five trial evaluations [84,89,92,[107][108][109]; and for review question three, we included 34 studies on stakeholders' views [20,25,34,37,44,53,54,60,62,72,78,82,86,90,93,94,97,[110][111][112][113][114][115][116][117][118][119][120][121][122][123][124][125][126] and 10 policy documents [20,22,[127][128][129][130][131][132]…”

“…We found 34 papers [20,25,34,37,44,53,54,60,62,72,78,82,86,90,93,94,97,[110][111][112][113][114][115][116][117][118][119][120][121][122][123][124][125][126] relating to 32 studies, which reported stakeholders' views on how sexual assault services should identify and respond to mental health and substance misuse problems for people following sexual assault. Twenty five were peer-reviewed publications [25,34,44,53,54,60,72,78,82,90,94,[110][111][112][113][114]…”

“…Twenty five studies [20,34,37,53,62,72,86,93,94,97,110,[112][113][114][115][116][118][119][120][121][122][123][124][125][126] reported more general perspectives and recommendations by stakeholders regarding service organisation or delivery within sexual assault services, with relevance to the experience of people with mental health and substance misuse needs. Characteristics and recommendations of each study are provided in the data supplement (S5 File).…”

“…[20, 34,97,121,124]; iii) s staff in sexual assault services should always display kindness and compassion and offer unconditional acceptance and belief of the service users [20,93,114,115,121,122]; iv) Service users should be clearly informed about what are the sexual assault service procedures and should have choice and control over what happens to them at all times[20, 34, 44,97,113,114].…”

Sexual Assault Survivors’ Experiences with Mental Health Professionals: A Qualitative Study

“…Australian researchers found that mental health workers responding to survivors had not had adequate SA training and rarely referred women to mental health professionals specializing in SA recovery (McLindon & Harms, 2011). On the other hand, adolescent SA victims reported positive experiences with well-trained SA Nurse Examiners (SANEs) (Campbell, Greeson, & Fehler-Cabral, 2013). Although promising, research has yet to investigate women’s positive and negative experiences with mental health professionals after disclosing SA in their own words (Campbell, Dworkin, & Cabral, 2009).…”