Busy emergency department and low staffing levels at the Nicola Valley means some assault victims must make the trip to Kamloops in order to utilize sexual assault kits.
Despite a report from a community health meeting held in June which indicated otherwise, officials from the Interior Health Authority confirmed that sexual assault kits are still accessible at the Nicola Valley Hospital.
But due to a low number of on-duty staff in the emergency department, most people who come into the hospital to report a sexual assault will be transported to Royal Inlands Hospital in Kamloops for the kit to be administered.
“It is case by case,” said Bev Grossler, the hospitals and community integrated services manager for acute residential and emergency in the Thompson-Cariboo rural. “I would sort of say that in the majority of instances and circumstances, we’ve had to rely on the expertise of our closest facility to support that piece of the picture.”
Following a community health meeting held in June, a report was circulated which compiled the list of strengths and weaknesses of health care in the region. At least one attendee remarked that the Nicola Valley Hospital was no longer administering sexual assault kits at the facility.
“I would say that we provide the emotional and clinical support to clients and we rely on the RCMP and the other resources that they have available to support a person who has been assaulted to help them to get the best care they can get,” said Grossler. “If that requires them to be transferred to another facility — I think, given an understanding of why we’re doing it — we’re not [transporting the patient] because we don’t want to [administer the kit] — we’re doing it because we don’t have the clinical capacity at the moment to provide that service.”
The report explicitly stated that no attempt was made to verify the claims of the participants in the community health meeting. “The purpose of the consultation was to glean the ‘story’ from the community’s perspective,” stated the introduction to the report. The full document is available online at merrittherald.com by searching for “community health.”
Sexual assault kits are tools used by doctors and specifically trained nurses to obtain forensic evidence from a person following the report of a sexual assault. A spokesperson for the Merritt RCMP explained that time is an important factor when administering the kits — the sooner evidence is gathered following an assault, the better the likelihood is of obtaining usable samples.
But as Grossler explained, the procedure requires both a doctor and a nurse to be present with the victim for up to an hour while the tests are conducted. With a busy emergency department at the Nicola Valley Hospital, and only one doctor on call, urgent acute care takes precedence over administering the sexual assault kits.
“Once you open up a data collection kit you cannot leave it,” said Grossler. “You cannot leave the room for a minute and come back, you have to stay until the kit is complete, because that would be a breach in the collection of the data and the evidence.”
Nurses can be trained to administer the sexual assault kits without a physician, but Grossler said the problem then becomes keeping those nurses up to speed with the procedure, despite a low incidence of sexual assaults being reported at the hospital.
“The difficulty is sending away someone for training is maintaining that competency once they are back,” said Grossler, adding that more than two nurses would have to be trained due to the way nurses’ shifts align at the facility.
Despite the somewhat onerous process of transporting an assault victim to Kamloops, Grossler said that she hasn’t heard of assault victims refusing the test on the basis of having to travel. She pointed out that the sexual assault kits are only one aspect of the care provided by IH when it comes to reports of sexual assault.
“I would say that we provide the emotional and clinical support to clients and we rely on the RCMP and the other resources that they have available to support a person who has been assaulted to help them to get the best care they can get,” said Grossler. “If that requires them to be transferred to another facility — I think, given an understanding of why we’re doing it — we’re not [transporting the patient] because we don’t want to [administer the kit] — we’re doing it because we don’t have the clinical capacity at the moment to provide that service.”
