My general experience is that people are lousy at dealing with conflict directly. I was reminded of this relatively recently, as many of you may recall. So I couldn’t be happier with the fact that IAFN is offering a webinar, Ethical Communication–Making it Work. It will be held October 2nd from 2-3:15 pm ET. Cost is $15/members ($30 non-members) and will net you 1 CEU.
For my colleagues in corrections: the National Institute of Corrections has a new web page dedicated to LGBTQI youth in the justice system. You can also find an archived webinar on Gender Identity Disorder here (upper right corner).
Good morning, my friends. It’s going to be a busy week, as I head to San Diego tomorrow for the Emergency Nurses Association conference. If you’re going to be there, please come find me–there’s a good chance I’ll be somewhere near the IAFN exhibitor’s booth in between work sessions and actual conference sessions (I have no idea when the last time was that I went to a conference where I wasn’t presenting!). In the meantime, a few things that have caught my eye since last we spoke:
I often harp on how much I value Twitter as a tool for both education and social commentary, so I figured I would share my list of 10 organizations and individuals forensic healthcare professionals should consider following. Remember, this is just my list–I would love to hear who else you think is a good follow for our profession. My goal, of course is to move more forensic healthcare professionals into the Twittersphere. I like to think of this list as a great foundation for building your own Twitter stream.
The Stalking Resource Center has an online course available: The Use of Technology to Stalk. From the site:
Cell phones. GPS. Computers. Did you know that these technologies can be dangerous weapons in a stalker’s arsenal? This self-paced, interactive course will give you a better understanding of how stalkers use these and other technologies to locate, harass, and surveil their victims. You will also identify steps to assist in investigating stalking crimes and supporting victims of stalking.
I will be doing a lunchtime SANE-A mini-prep course for IAFN’s next webinar. It will be held September 27th from 12-1:30 pm and will cost $15 ($30 for non-members), which also nets you one CEU. It’s important to note that this session will only concentrate on the two areas of the exam that have traditionally been most troubling for exam takers: patient assessment and interaction with the judicial process (hence the mini part of mini-prep course).
How is it possible I went most of the summer without posting one of these? Embarrassing. What follows is what’s caught my eye from the August/September/October journals (with a couple of late July articles tossed in for good measure). As always, this is not an exhaustive list, but I do have to say, it’s a pretty good one. There’s a lot of great looking research among this group of pubs.
Two of IAFN’s members (including Board Secretary Kim Nash) are heading to Swaziland to work with local clinicians caring for pediatric sexual assault patients. It’s an amazing opportunity and I am excited to hear about their travels and what they learn while they’re there. And lucky us, they’ve decided to blog about their experiences, so now we can follow along.
I’m such a big fan of science–but of course, you know this. I will always post resources and tools that are grounded in solid science. That is, science that’s been shown to be valid and reliable. Science I cite when I teach and when I testify.
I feel like a bit of a broken record, but there’s yet another available resource on EC. This comes from K4Health (which is a USAID site) and it’s a pretty comprehensive (and globally-minded) toolkit. Certainly worth checking out.
A reader asked me if I had anything on drug endangered children that could be used for staff training. As it so happens, I do: the National Alliance for Drug Endangered Children (whose healthcare protocols I’ve mentioned before here) has many archived webinars on this topic that are geared toward both law enforcement and medical audiences:
Did anyone talk about anything else besides Rep. Akin’s ludicrous and offensive sexual assault comments last week? I suppose we did, but it certainly dominated a lot of the conversation (hopefully you had the opportunity to read IAFN”s statement). Fortunately, there has been other stuff in the news since last we spoke:
The Vera Institute’s Accessing Safety Initiative has an upcoming webinar, Mental Health and Domestic and Sexual Violence. The session will be held Tuesday, September 11th at 3pm ET. You can register here. Sadly, I have no further information on this one, so if anyone has more details, please add them in the Comments.
IAFN has released a statement in response to Rep. Akin’s claims about pregnancy and sexual assault. Read it in its entirety here (PDF).
The National Sexual Assault Conference is in Chicago this week and I am not there. Bummer. Many of my favorite people on the planet are there, and I guarantee some great conversations will be taking place. If like me, you wish you were attending, but aren’t, you can follow much of the goings-on via twitter by searching #NSAC2012 (UPDATE: #NSAC and #NSAC_2012 also being used). For those of you (and I’m talking to a huge number of forensic nurses now) who don’t yet use twitter, I will just say again that it’s more than just getting status updates. Our colleagues will be posting links to some fantastic tools and resources, which makes it worth your time to occasionally hop on and peruse.
The World Health Organization has a new fact sheet on emergency contraception available on their site. It covers both pills and IUDs.
We have several new things posted in the Canada section for you to check out. Also, FHO has amassed a fair number of Australian readers–outside North America, it’s where I’m most likely to see new subscribers. If there are any Australians who would like to a.) see an Australia-specific section; and b.) want to be responsible for sending me materials to keep that section updated I would be happy to add it.
The California HIV/STD Prevention Training Center has several online offerings that would be useful–particularly for new clinicians who need to shore up on basics, including the CDC Guidelines. There are online courses, archived webinars and podcasts to choose from, so it’s worth checking out the site. Take note–one of them is a video (15 minutes long) on the new gonorrhea treatment issues. Perfect for a staff meeting CE update.
I’m double-dipping on this one, but let’s face it–it’s pretty much all I’ve been reading about since last we spoke and it’s a whopper of a topic for a Spot the Myths segment here at FHO. If you’ve turned on a television in the US or picked up a newspaper or looked at your Facebook page or twitter, etc., you’ve probably caught this story. Rep. Todd Akin, a Republican candidate for the US Senate in Missouri had a few things to say about “legitimate rape”, and not surprisingly, it’s led to some “legitimate political action“, at least in my house.
All this “legitimate rape” conversation has me thinking about access to emergency contraception. I try to make sure we have pretty healthy coverage of the topic here at FHO, since so many of our patients choose to use it post-sexual assault. But in case you’re looking for a national overview on availability, please see the Guttmacher Institute’s State Policies in Brief: Emergency Contraception (PDF). It’s current as of the beginning of this month. And for those of you who’ve never read your own professional organization’s position on access to EC for sexual assault patients, I encourage you to seek it out and review it. You should know what it says (and if your organization doesn’t have one, maybe it’s time to get one written). You can find IAFN’s here (PDF); ACOG’s here; ACEP’s here; and AMA’s here (PDF). If I have left some out, please add them in the Comments.