Tulsa City Council is eyeing a federally-appropriated grant of half a million dollars that would expand sexual assault services for all of Oklahoma through a program run through the city for nearly four decades.
Councilors will vote Dec. 14 on a $500,000 National Institute Justice Grant grant given to the Tulsa Police Department through the Department of Justice’s 2022 Expanding Access to Sexual Assault Forensic Examinations Grant Program. The grant was given to TPD to focus “on improving the provision of sexual assault care using a community-based approach," according to a policy statement provided to Public Radio Tulsa.
If approved by council, the grant would be used to add two statewide positions to Tulsa’s sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) program, which has provided forensic and medical services for sexual assault patients since 1994.
SANE operates through the Tulsa Police Department out of Hillcrest Hospital and currently serves about 400 patients each year. That number has included patients in southeast Kansas, said Tulsa police nurse examiner Kasey Magness.
“Right now, we have 77 counties in Oklahoma, and there’s only 33 programs in the state. So what this grant will do, is it will allow us to hire a statewide SANE coordinator and a statewide clinical coordinator to be able to broaden those programs and try to have all counties be able to have a sexual assault nurse examiner, be able to do those SANE exams, no matter where you are in the state,” Magness said.
The statewide coordinator would work with law enforcement, hospitals and advocacy workers throughout the state to implement more nurse examiners so that patients can have access to the same services provided in Tulsa, Magness said.
Magness also said the grant could be used to pay nurse examiners in the program for when they are on call or in court for the sexual assault cases they oversaw.
