A Trend in Healthcare Facilities & SANE Care?

www.wsaw.com

People who have been sexually assaulted and want to get a forensic exam in and around Marshfield will now have to travel to Weston to receive care within the Marshfield Clinic Health System. Last week Marshfield Medical Center-Marshfield notified staff that the program is being eliminated due to “business reasons.”

This is a long read, so grab some coffee. I was interested in this headline since I grew up in this area of Wisconsin and still have family in the area. This is a bad decision for the community and the population that may be affected by crime and violence. The leadership of this well-known facility in Wisconsin obviously made a decision based only on finances and without consideration of community outcomes. Do they think people who experience abuse and violence will travel to a community where the crime did not occur to obtain forensic services? Do they think the LE agency in a town of 18,000 will have the bandwidth to travel out of their county to investigate sexual assault? Did the hospital leadership consider changing from an on-call system to a hybrid model that included in-house services and perhaps 'on-call' services for other times? Maybe there should be less emphasis on just SANE services and attention from leadership on the varied populations of patients that forensic nurses have the expertise to serve. Maybe this is a lesson in how forensic nursing programs need to design and promote a business approach that does not include soft, unreliable grant funding for aspects of a clinical program but addresses a rigorous budget that supports forensic healthcare and avenues of fiscal support. This trend is disconcerting and is happening in several states. Recently a Catholic health corporation in Colorado closed 3 SANE/FNE programs in the middle of summer and suggested to the dissolving team, that ED nurses and physicians could be taught to provide the same care. ...Submitted for member review and discussion...