Comfort and Confidence of Nurses Providing Sexual Assault Medical Forensic Examinations with TeleSANE Guidance

Authors

• Wah Wah Myint, School of Public Health, Texas A&M UniversityFollow
• Heather R. Clark, School of Public Health, Texas A&M UniversityFollow
• Kim A. Zemanek, Center of Excellence in Forensic Nursing, Texas A&M UniversityFollow
• Kayce Ward, Center of Excellence in Forensic Nursing, Texas A&M UniversityFollow
• Stacey A. Mitchell, Center of Excellence in Forensic Nursing, Texas A&M University School of NursingFollow
• Nancy R. Downing, College of Nursing, University of North Texas Health at Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TXFollow

Abstract

This study evaluates changes in comfort and confidence of the nurses performing SAFEs using Telehealth SANE (telecines) guidance in the sexual assault nurse examiners (SANE) program. We used de-identified data from pre- and post-training comfort and confidence surveys after the 7-hour Tex-TRAC Forensic and Cart Training (N=878). Descriptive statistics and effect sizes of nurses’ comfort and confidence in the overall score and five components were examined: practicing trauma-informed care (TIC), documenting a patient’s history of sexual assault (SA), identifying anogenital anatomy, documenting injuries, and collecting evidence. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test or t-test were applied to examine pre- and post-training improvements. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test results identified that an overall change in median cumulative score was significantly larger in the post-survey (pre-survey median (Mdn_pre) =17, post-survey Mdn_post=20, Z= -6.15, ppre=16 vs. Mdn_post=20, Z=-6.55, ppre=3, Mdn_post=4): practicing TIC (Z=-6.38, p

Author ORCID Identifier

WWM: 0000-0003-4280-2493

HRC: 0000-0003-4688-0317

KAZ: 0000-0002-0303-1270

KW: 0009-0007-5692-2716

SAM: 0000-0002-6341-0731

NRD:0000-0002-4975-3789

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Recommended Citation

Myint, Wah Wah; Clark, Heather R.; Zemanek, Kim A.; Ward, Kayce; Mitchell, Stacey A.; and Downing, Nancy R. (2026) "Comfort and Confidence of Nurses Providing Sexual Assault Medical Forensic Examinations with TeleSANE Guidance," Health Behavior Research: Vol. 9: No. 1.