Texas Health Resources recently opened a department focused on caring for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.
The Forensic Healthcare and Violence Intervention Department launched in Fort Worth, Arlington and Dallas. The health care system plans to expand the department into nine more Texas Health hospitals in September.
Cindy Burnette, the department’s director and a sexual assault nurse examiner, said it spawned from a growing understanding that nurses trained to care for sexual assault victims have a skill set that can be applied more widely.
“We learned that the skills that we had just to treat that sexual assault component of violence are the same skills that are needed to also help individuals that are experiencing domestic violence or intimate partner violence, as well as even elder abuse and different types of trafficking,” Burnette said.
The department is funded by a $1.5 million grant from the Moody Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to better Texans’ lives. With the funds, Texas Health plans to hire two more full-time sexual assault nurse examiners, or SANE nurses, bringing the department’s total to 30 full- and part-time nurses.
SANE nurses receive specialized training to get certified. They learn how to properly collect evidence, take forensic photographs, testify in court and talk with victims who have been through a traumatic experience.
Texas Health nurse examiners treated nearly 800 sexual assault victims in 2024, and more than 1 in 5 of those assaults involved an intimate partner, Burnette said.
She added that victims of domestic violence are 4.5 times more likely to visit the emergency room as the average person, creating more opportunities for them to receive help.
“We just know that these individuals are going to enter our hospital quite a bit, so if we can catch them and help them in that way, that’s really going to be so beneficial,” Burnette said.
Texas Health began collaborating with SafeHaven of Tarrant County, a domestic violence center, through a strangulation response team in summer 2023.
Kathryn Jacob, president and CEO of SafeHaven, said the center “could not be more excited” about the new department.
“The addition of this department will just really exponentially enhance the collaboration that we currently have,” Jacob said. “I think they’ll be able to identify more potential clients and that we can get folks into SafeHaven services … with kind of a greater depth of service delivery with them putting some resources behind something like this.”
The strangulation response team was created to help high-risk victims and reduce the number of intimate partner homicides in Tarrant County, Jacob said.
If someone is strangled by their partner once, they are 700 times as likely to be strangled again, Jacob said. They are also 800 times as likely to be killed by their partner — most often with a gun.
The response program was piloted at the health care system’s downtown Fort Worth hospital, and has since expanded beyond Texas Health Resources.
Members of a strangulation response team visit patients at their bedside to offer resources. Even if the victim is not willing or able to leave the abusive situation, the team at least wants to make the person aware of the danger they are in and make sure they know that help is available.
Burnette emphasized that those who return to abusive partners should be treated with compassion. Reasons why someone might not report abuse include embarrassment, fear of retaliation and cultural customs.
“They may feel safer at home, truthfully, knowing where that person is than looking over their shoulder,” Burnette said.
The response team currently averages six hospital visits per month, but Jacob expects that number to go up with the creation of the new department.
“The more you look for something, the more you’re going to find it, right?” Jacob said. “I anticipate with (Texas Health Resources) having this new department, we will get more calls, and that would be wonderful. I mean, I hate that we would get the calls, but I want to catch as many of these as I can.”
McKinnon Rice is a reporting fellow for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at mckinnon.rice@fortworthreport.org.
Disclosure: Texas Health Resources has been a financial supporter of the Fort Worth Report.
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