Ethical Issues In Forensic Nursing

What would you do if you were a forensic nurse called in the middle of the night to a police station to treat the hand of a person that is a suspect of serious assault, and when you question him on his injuries he tells you that he got them by punching the person that raped him? Is this man a victim of abuse or a suspect of serious assault? Ethical dilemmas such as this one are a common occurrence that, unfortunately, forensic nurses face in their everyday work. Although there are a vast number of nurses in the world, only a fraction of them are forensic nurses. Forensic nursing is a nursing field with subspecialties that focus on nursing practices that care for victims of violent crimes, such as sexual assault, at the clinical and legal level. Forensic nurses bring together medical practices and the justice system in making sure that clinicians or medical examiners have not accidentally tainted the evidence. In a courtroom, nothing is more crucial than the
Lynch, who with her determination to stop clinicians from inadvertently obstructing justice, encouraged a new nursing specialty. In an interview with Virginia A. Lynch she mentioned how when she first started out as a forensic nurse and how “It…never occurred to [her] that the health care professions were unintentionally obstructing justice” (Waszak). Waszak then goes on in detail to how Lynch first started her career as a forensic nurse, and how when she first visited a crime lab in Texas in 1982 and how she “noticed how evidence… [was] often lost, discarded or returned to [the] family [of the victim] instead of secured and handed over to authorities” (Waszak). Additionally she gives us an insight into what a “typical” day for a forensic nurse looks like. When asked, Virginia A. Lynch goes on to describe her day like