This is an interdisciplinary approach in presenting the roles among nurses in relation with gathering, documenting, handling, and safekeeping of forensic related evidence among patients' cases involving sexual abuse, as sexual abuse is a universal concern. Nurses play a vital role in working with other professionals involved in the criminal justice system. Nurses, being the frontline officers and assess admitted cases of sexual abuses, work alongside with law enforcement to gather and safekeep evidence in cases of sexual assault and other related forms of violence.
Through a comprehensive review of related cases and available literatures, the study highlights the critical role of nurses in forensic evidence gathering to ensure legal victory among abused patients and to secure higher convictions of assailants. Sexual abuse cases admitted in medical institutions are often neglected circumstances that leads to a compromised prosecution of said offenses. In advanced countries, a field of specialization is called as Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE), where trained forensic nurses play a pivotal role in history taking, evidence gathering and documentation of cases, resulting in timely examination of sexual assault victims, employing the skills with care and humanitarian approach.
Due to toxic work environment inside most hospitals among developing countries, like the Philippines, emergency rooms are swamped with various medical cases, that tends to deprive abuse victims of proper care, guidance, and patent delays in the examination of survivors. In actual scenarios involving admission of sexual abuse survivors, seeking a safe environment is a primordial concern among nurses in any institution. Upon ensuring the survivors' safety, nurses must accurately record or document all injuries observed or assessed from an abused patient to ensure its purpose as future legal evidence in court.
During the stage of confinement, nurses must continue medicolegal records maintenance, evidence gathering, collection of important trace evidence, sample preservation, as well as preservation of mental and physical well -beings of victims. Hence, the important roles of nurses in abuse cases will lead to a prompt forensic examination of sexual assault survivors and evidence preservation leading to success in the conviction of sexual aggressors. In fact, their direct participation can unload responsibilities among other health care professionals inside the institution, while the former handles these cases with expertise, employing humanitarian care.