A SANE Program for Rural West Virginia
FRIS offers information, technical assistance, training, and other resources to support SANE program development in West Virginia, and the concept of a regional mobile SANE project first surfaced at a FRIS-sponsored SANE training in 2002. The coalition embraced the idea immediately, recognizing the potential benefits such a program would offer to victims living in rural areas. These victims had limited access to medical resources: several of the state’s 55 primarily rural counties lacked licensed medical facilities. Few rural communities supported a SANE program and those that did struggled to maintain an adequate number of SANEs. In smaller hospitals that saw few patients who presented as sexual assault victims, it was difficult to justify the costs of a SANE program and hard for SANEs to maintain their clinical proficiency. To help its rural communities overcome some of these problems, FRIS explored the feasibility of pioneering a mobile SANE project that would bring the services of SANEs to victims of sexual assault who lived in rural areas.