National TeleNursing Center: Program Evaluation Final Report

The Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) funded National TeleNursing Center (NTC) was implemented by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health's Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) program to develop and evaluate telemedicine in providing consultation to SANE nurses conducting forensic sexual assault medical examinations in remote and/or underserved hospitals. Initial program sites included two naval hospitals, a rural hospital, and a tribal hospital to address unmet need in patient populations considered underserved; two additional hospital sites were added later to serve urban and suburban populations. This report is presented in six chapters that introduce the NTC project, provides an overview of the development of the NTC, summarizes findings and recommendations from past reports, presents data on the delivery of services, provides updated results of site clinicians' experiences with telenursing services, and discusses lessons learned from over five years of project implementation.