Ask anyone in the health care industry and they will tell you quickly that nurses, as a general proposition, are in short supply.

A great number of them left the business in the past couple of years, burned out by the pandemic.

And many nursing schools report fewer people are going into the profession in the first place.

Add it all up and you have shortages across the map, including right here in Michigan. And now it seems, there is a shortage of nurses trained very specifically to treat victims of sexual trauma.

Officials are seeking funding to expand a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner, also known as SANE, program that helps nurses treat victims facing short-term crises and long-term consequences of sexual violence victimization.

Sexual assault forensic exams, or rape kits, are used to collect DNA evidence from a victim’s body or clothes. But training to perform these exams are not part of the education received in medical, nursing or physicians’ assistant school, Kimberly Hurst, the founder of Avalon Healing Center, recently told lawmakers. The Detroit group provides free and immediate comprehensive care to survivors of sexual violence.

She said the need for such programs is clear, with Michigan ranking fourth in the U.S. for the prevalence of sexual assault and seventh for trafficking, according to the FBI.

The state hasn’t been completely tone deaf to this issue. The 2022-23 state budget does include a $102,600 allocation for SANE programs throughout the state as well as a $430,500 allocation to track sexual assault forensic exams after 11,000 rape kits were found in 2009 in an evidence locker without ever being tested.

Bottom line: Communities are in dire need of sufficient nursing care, including nurses trained in various specialties such as sexual assault.

State government should do more by way of funding to help address this problem, which impacts all of us.

— The Mining Journal, Marquette