A Brief Look Into Forensic Nursing

Submitted by: David Alen

A Forensic nurse is a nurse with specially trained in forensic evidence collection, criminal procedures, legal testimony expertise, and more. The Forensic nurse works as a link between the medical profession and that of the criminal justice system. Forensic nurse is something like the person having the medical qualification of a nurse and also the investigative abilities of the police detective. Forensic nurses are becoming very important in the recent field of crime and justice as the police detectives don t always have idea about drugs, medical condition of victim or other medically relevant facts and clues.

Forensic Nurses work out of a hospital or within the hospital in emergency rooms. Nowadays, hospital admissions are not always because of the accidents or medical conditions; but also due to household crime and fighting, burglary or other crime related aspects. Hence, it is necessary to find the condition from the justice point of view as well. Hence, forensic nurses are important. When there are injuries involved like bruises, cuts, scars, etc; it may not always be due to accidents. People try to take advantage that the patient can t say anything and try to hide their crime. Hence, there need to be people to analyze the situation and find out the possible causes of the accident. This is only one aspect of forensic nursing. There are various other duties that a forensic nurse should perform.

Forensic nursing can also have a work on Medico legal Death Investigation. This includes the identification of the remains of the people who have died and who are not easily identifiable. During various natural calamities and accidents, he remains cannot be identified. Hence, Forensic nursing helps to do so.

Becoming a forensic nurse does that mean that one has to work with dead bodies. It is only one aspect of forensic nursing. There are various branches from forensic nursing like: expert medical witness, Sexual Assault nursing, Nurse Death investigator, or Medico legal death investigation, etc.

Another important aspect of forensic nursing job is sexual harassment case or a child abuse case. The forensic nurse should find about the possible cause of the injury and understand whether it has been caused by a person. Forensic Nurse should have education on legal testimony and the proper collection of evidence and how to preserve that evidence.

The term forensic nurse was first used in 1992 during the first ever national convention of sexual assault nurses and was later recognized by the American Association of Nurses in 1996.

To start a nursing career one has to start either as nurse aid (or what usually called as CAN) or certified medical assistant/ registered medical assistant (CMA or RMA) and branch out into a number of specialized nursing fields such as forensic nursing. The usual route taken by many nurse after becoming CNA or equivalent is to advance their career through cna to lpn programs. And then take a bridge course to become RN from there. If you are eager you can also jump right in to lpn programs.

About the Author: More articles from same author:

lpntrainingprograms.org/lpn-refresher-course

and

lpntrainingprograms.org/lpn-to-rn-programs

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