team introduction. My name is Christina Prezente and I am the membership manager here at the International Association of Forensic Nurses. I will be your guide today as we walk through today's training. I'll begin with our disclosures. The planners, presenters, and content reviewers of this session disclose no conflicts of interest. In order to receive a certificate documenting your contact hours, you must evaluate the session you've attended and complete the session evaluation. The International Association of Forensic Nurses is an accredited provider of nursing continuing professional development by the American Nurses Credentialing Center's Commission on Accreditation. This presentation was produced by the International Association of Forensic Nurses under the following grant number that was awarded by the Office for Victims of Crime Office of Justice Program, United States Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this presentation are those of the contributors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the United States Department of Justice. I will pause before we get into a little deeper information about actually forming your SART and highlight a couple of resources. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center was awarded a grant to update the SART toolkit and that now lives on the National Sexual Violence Resource Center's website. I'm going to screen share and show you that website in just a minute. In addition to that toolkit that is stocked full of resources, tools, and links to specific TA or technical assistance providers on a variety of topics, there are also a number of webinars. Those webinars will live in two places. One is on the National Sexual Violence Resource Center's YouTube channel. Another is on the International Association of Forensic Nurses Online Learning Center. If you like CE, please visit the IAFN's Online Learning Center to make sure you can access those CE. Those two resources, and those are actually a lot of resources into two little bullet points here, can be really instrumental to you in getting your SART set up or navigating ongoing concerns throughout your SART. A SART really needs a lot of attention and maintenance because you have so many different people that sit around a table that come from different backgrounds with different experience and different legal requirements to do their jobs. So, having access to up-to-date resources is really essential. Another resource that is always available to you are the forensic nurse specialists here at the International Association of Forensic Nurses. Our nurses are on call to provide one-on-one support to any forensic nurses or any multidisciplinary, excuse me, any multidisciplinary team members who have questions, who want to work together a little bit better, who have questions about practice, who have questions about building programs, MOUs, anything that might come up, we're happy to assist you or refer you to some of our partners that can. I will include our contact information at the conclusion of this webinar, but please feel free to reach out to whoever on staff you know and are friends with, and we will make sure you get to the right person that can help you out with whatever your concern is at the time. Without further ado, I'm going to screen share and jump through the SART toolkit to show you a quick, quick overview of some of the resources and topics that you can find there. I encourage you to explore on your own and reach out to anyone at IAFN, or if you're in that toolkit and you need assistance, please reach out to the staff member at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, and they'd be more than happy to assist you. So this is the SART toolkit at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, and there's a lot of different sections here. There's a lot of content, so I'm just going to do a really quick overview and orientation. This section here is a really good place to start, so if you are not familiar with a SART, I really encourage you to take a look here, learn about SARTs, what to do, quick overview, take a little deeper, build your SART, section three. This part, again, really, really good. So under the membership section, you're going to learn about traditional SARTs as well as SARTs that involve a lot of different community partners and how to include them. There's a lot of people in your community who can be really, really critical, either to making referrals to your SART or for your SART to make referrals to, to really do those wraparound services and support survivors. So I really would love for you all to check that page out. Building your SART really helps you understand how to set up a critical foundation. A lot of SARTs are good intention, but not having a basis or common understanding really leads to problems as you go down the line. And relationships, relationships are key. So these are all really, really important things for you to take a look at as you're building your SART. There's a ton of resources here, there's tools, there's links to some technical assistance organizations that can get you started. I'm just going to jump back here. Meeting logistics. This is one of my favorite sections here, but it is not everybody's favorite section. The details involved in setting up a meeting, holding a successful meeting, holding people accountable, having meetings that include everyone's voices, or decisions are getting made when you're building from meeting to meeting, you're not rehashing the same things over and over are really important. And there's a lot of really essential tools to help you achieve those goals. So if you are a meeting nerd, even if you're not, if that's an area that you need support, great place for you to check that out. A lot of SARTs, there's kind of two types of SARTs. One really is the first responders. So the teams that get together and are the first responders when there is an incidence of violence. The other type of SARTs are more systems based or systems approach. So they're looking at the sexual assault response as either a community or a state, and they're asking, how do we improve this over time? And this part here, you'll really get kind of now down into the nitty gritty of what your, that first SART I talked about, like that immediate response looks like, some of the different aspects that a SART might be looking at if they are doing that more long-term systems response, how do they improve what is happening for victims in your community? And so that is a little bit about that, but here you can see there's a lot of topics that you can dive in and get more information. This next section six is a really important, important, excuse me, section of the toolkit. So this section really focuses on equity. So equity of access to services, some of our more marginalized communities as well, and really folks that maybe need a little extra. So this is a good spot to look. I know a lot of folks that we talk to sometimes say we don't have X population here, whatever that population is. And I think that one of the things that you can do as a SART is try to identify the gaps in people that you're not seeing and start doing outreach to let them know that your services exist and to understand for them what those barriers may or may not be. But this is a really, really great place to start digging into some of those questions to see how you might do that as a team, maybe to work on the needs assessments that help you identify some of the populations, and then the tool on how to work a little bit better with various populations as well. So the glossary has some commonly used terms. One thing that we see when we have multiple different organizations or disciplines working together is that we use the same words, but they might not have the same meaning. So this glossary could be a starting point for you if that's something that you're seeing in your community as a challenge. And then there's an outline if that's helpful if you're looking for something specific. There's a lot of content here. So you might have to use a control find feature, but I just wanted to walk you through this really great resource. So hopefully, if you're looking for something, this is a great, great place to start. All right. And without further ado, we will start your SART formation webinar that will provide a basic overview of some of the initial building blocks to think about prior to or the initiation of getting your SART set up. Hello. I'm Christina Prisani from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, and I'm happy to welcome you to the webinar, SART Foundation. This is one of many webinars you can find in the SART toolkit at www.nsvrc.org backslash SART toolkit. NSVRC would like to thank the Office for Victims of Crime for their support and funding of this webinar and the entire SART toolkit. We would also like to offer the disclaimer that the opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed are those of the contributors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the United States Department of Justice. Again, the website for the SART toolkit is www.nsvrc.org backslash SART toolkit. Without further ado, we are really excited to introduce our presenters for today's webinar. These are two wonderfully experienced folks in this field who are going to chat with you about their SART work. Thank you all for joining us. My name is Gosha Schmitz, and I'm the 17th Judicial Sex Assault Response Team Coordinator in Colorado. Hi, everyone. My name is Lisa Rangelfield, and I am a consultant primarily focusing on sexual violence research and evaluation and sexual assault response team training. We're happy to be here today. All right, so we're going to jump right in. We talk a lot about sexual assault response teams, SARTs, and oftentimes while it is a frequent part of our vocabulary, we don't think often about what does it take to actually put together a SART and get one going. Oftentimes, we struggle in bringing disparate voices together to the same table, even though we're all trying to address the same problem. There's a lot of suspicion, I think, that's out there around establishing a SART. We wanted to do this webinar for you all to help you think about if you're wondering what it takes, that hopefully we can answer some of those questions for you. A couple of things to think about before we start out is that it's really important not to cut corners. You don't want to rush putting together a SART because if you want it to be sustainable, it needs to have a really strong foundation. There are a lot of things to think about, yes, but it doesn't have to be a difficult process. You can achieve a great deal simply by opening lines of communication and developing shared policies and practices among agencies who are all trying to address the same problem, which is support survivors, prevent sexual violence, and hold offenders accountable. That's one of the key things is that folks at the table recognizing that you're all working towards that same goal. And while past relationships, past conflicts that may have existed in your small or large community are there and they happen, it's important not to be tied down by those. It's also important to be able to develop solutions and move forward. And then the last thing I'll say on this first slide is that it's really important to not stop at understanding the SART as simply a monthly or quarterly meeting of people who talk about stuff and then nothing really gets done, right? The SART is so much more and like the picture depicts there, it really presents a community with a good opportunity and a good chance to proactively work on change in their community. So what exactly is a SART? A definition is that it's a multidisciplinary interagency team of individuals, collaborative working relationships that provide services for the community by offering specialized sexual assault intervention services. So that is very broad. We will break it down a little bit more for you. So when you're thinking about a team that's trying to do the information on the previous slide, it's really important to remember that they're specialized to fit the needs of each community. So you have a community of 6,000 people. The needs there are going to be very different than the needs of a large urban community, you know, the size of Chicago, right? So it's really, that's an important thing to understand as we go through these slides, that there's not necessarily a one-size-fits-all. And as we talk about opportunities and ideas to remember that they can be adapted for your specific needs. So ultimately, right, a general goal of a SART is to increase reporting and conviction of sex assault offenders and then of sex assault offenders and then countering the experience of sexual trauma with a sensitive and competent response. And so often those sensitive and competent response pieces come when people work together and they work across disciplines with a shared goal. And as just a side note, we have in our experience encountered agencies that often when they hear that a goal is to increase reporting, they think that it means that suddenly somehow sex assault, which has never been occurring in their community, suddenly is occurring, which we all know to not be true. And so really it's to help folks recognize that by increasing reporting, if you are taking the veil of secrecy off of what's happening in the community and hopefully resulting in conviction of those sex assault offenders. So a little bit about the SART history. They were first developed in the 1970s. And this was in a response to the need for a more integrated and streamlined approach to victim-survivor support and offender accountability. All these agencies were working towards these similar goals. However, they felt like they were working against one another rather than together. And this would sometimes result in victims and survivors not receiving the best outcomes. They were also developed to address low reporting and prosecution rates, victim blaming and rape myths, which we're still seeing both of those to this day, and underutilization of same programs in general medical care. In fact, in the 1970s, most folks did not know what a same program is. Okay, Jonah. So yeah, to go off of that, the reason this graphic here, what we wanted to show you is of 100 rapes that are committed, you can see how this quickly goes down to only 0.2 to 2.8 percent of offenders are ever incarcerated. And another reason, one thing to note within this chart here is these are rates that have somehow been reported, not necessarily to law enforcement, but to community advocacy agencies or maybe to the hospital. We know that many, many folks that have been sexually assaulted never tell a single soul. So this number, you can definitely imagine that it's a lot larger in terms of how many are committed, but the incarceration rate remains the same. And this image is often referred to as the justice gap. And if you're interested in learning more about that, the reference for the article that included this data and this image is at the end of this presentation on the reference sheet. So, you know, one of the things that you're all probably aware of is that there's a lot of silos that exist in sex assault response. As Gosha mentioned, folks are working in opposition to each other or without communication between their respective agencies for whatever reason, and it's just always been that way. And so, obviously, over the last couple of decades, things have started to shift, and as multidisciplinary teams and SARTs have gained in popularity, we are seeing those silos breaking down. And so, you know, a SART was such a pivotal element of the change in the criminal justice system and with community-based advocacy and medical providers in terms of really breaking down those silos and reducing the contention that has often existed between agencies and this feeling of, you're trying to take over what I'm doing or you don't have a say in this or I know what I'm doing better than you. A SART, you know, historically has really, I think had a monumental effect on changing some of those attitudes by encouraging people working together. So we've talked about this a little bit already. Major purpose of the response team model is intended to minimize the number of contacts a victim or survivor has as they proceed through a criminal justice system. So many of you listening to this will already be aware of the desire that we have to reduce the number of times a victim or survivor has to share their story. So historically, perhaps they would be sharing this story with a friend or a family member and then perhaps with an advocate and then they'd have to share it again with a patrol officer and with a detective and then perhaps a victim advocate at the law enforcement agency. Perhaps they sought medical care and so there was a doctor and perhaps a couple of nurses that were involved there and the list goes on and on. And so this was fatiguing and really challenging for survivors who had experienced something so very traumatic and so we were seeing, you know, high numbers of survivors dropping out of the process and they weren't interested in staying involved. And a major purpose of a SART is to think about how can we do this differently? How can this pipeline look better for a survivor so that they're not having to repeat their story so they're not having to engage with individuals who explicitly have an air of disbelief about them? And I think that that's something that folks in the 70s and 80s started to realize and started to shift through the establishment of SARTs. Yeah, and I think that we also as a group know that generally most people don't even like to share their consensual sexual encounters with strangers. So what we were seeing our folks are not only having to recount a sexual encounter but an unwanted one and most often than not a very, very traumatizing one. So again, this is a reason why we were just seeing folks dropping out and no longer participating. So one of the big questions then is, is starting a SART really that suspicious of an idea? You know, you might have already broached this issue in your community if you don't currently have a SART and it may have had a mixed reception, maybe some raised eyebrows. I think some of the struggles is this hangover that still exists of distrust between agencies and a resistance, unwillingness. I'm not sure how you would want to frame that in terms of recognizing that we're all working towards the same goal and whether you're a community-based advocate or a detective of the Sex Crimes Unit, ultimately you wanna support that survivor and you wanna hold the offender accountable. And obviously not every survivor wants a criminal justice process. That's not necessarily their understanding of justice or healing. But if you're not working together, if you're not talking with each other, then it's really difficult to provide good and seamless service to survivors. However, with that can come suspicion. Advocates shouldn't be telling me what to do, I'm a law enforcement official. The DA should not be telling me how I need to investigate a case because that's my purview. Or the DA getting frustrated with law enforcement officials who they don't feel like they're doing full and thorough investigation. Or a hospital not calling community-based advocates. And so there's already this air of suspicion or distrust that permeates a lot of this work. And that obviously varies depending on your community. But Gosha and I don't believe that starting a thought is that suspicious of an idea. We actually think it's a really great idea. And if you can get enough people at the table and help them understand that it's a great idea, then I think a rolling stone will gather moss. I think that's the phrase. But it's not a wolf in sheep's clothing. Although I think some people think it is. The other thing that's really important about a SART, as you're talking about this within your community, is that they can facilitate a move away from this system of opposites that we've created. Good, bad, wrong, or right. So you're doing it right, I'm doing it, no, I'm doing it right, you're doing it wrong. Or that's a good way to do it, that's a bad way to do it. And so there's no gray, right? When we know actually there's a ton of gray and part of being able to talk to each other and come together is that we can reframe those conversations and recognize that we're working to balance versus in opposition of each other. So I think it's really, it presents a fantastic opportunity to have those conversations. Yeah, and just as an example of that, we have spoken to where law enforcement has felt that community-based advocates tell survivor victims to not engage with law enforcement. Conversely, the victim or the community-based advocates feel that law enforcement doesn't ever want to use them and they're not sure why. So it's really getting away from not looking at it as as community-based advocates, we are always doing it correctly and law enforcement doesn't understand. And law enforcement also not thinking, community advocates only wanna get in the way and they don't wanna let us do our job. Those are those opposites that really fight against one another versus when you take away those barriers and those blocks and allow folks to talk to one another, realize that while you're coming at it from a different standpoint or you're coming at it differently, you are working towards the same goal. And perhaps by having a conversation, you may see how you can help one another in the long run. So one of the things that comes up is what do you call your team? And so the work that I've done across the state and the, you know, go show up to the number of other thought-provoking names across the state is we have seen a whole host of names. And in many ways, the names are just semantics. It's a label that you give yourself that does have value and it ultimately should have meaning to the team itself. So we have included a couple of slides here with all of the different names that we have encountered. So we've got obviously your MDTs. We know of Sexual Assault Interagency Council, Child Adult Abuse Response Team, Sexual Assault Multidisciplinary Action Response Team. That one's a bit of a mouthful. Good acronym though. And then Sex Assault Response Committees or Council, Actual Response Team. So the name is an Actual Response Team. It's a team actually response. So it's like four or five people who are paged and then they are called out within a community to respond to a sex assault survivor. Case Review Teams, Task Forces, Interagency Councils. So as you can see, there's a plethora of titles that you could name yourself. So I don't need to get hung up on that. We have that struggle here. We have Interagency Councils and Response Teams and a couple of other names. And they're by and large, they do the same thing, but people kind of get stuck on why they have different names. And that is not super important in the scheme of things. And you need to develop a team that fits your community's needs. It also helps with identity development. We know, as Lisa mentioned, we've come across many different ways that SARTs work and function here in Colorado, for example. So we do have teams that their purpose is to do case reviews. So they call themselves differently than perhaps task forces. And we also have councils that meet regularly and then, for example, monthly, and then quarterly they will have their entire team meet. So again, like Lisa was mentioning, it all depends on the identity of the community that you're in. So the role of the SART, what can a SART really do? Definitely support victims and survivors' rights. We know that in the criminal justice world, a victim's survivor's rights feel that they are often not heard and not as important as others. So the role of the SART is really to keep that at the forefront. Also holding offenders accountable. So this is, again, a reminder that what had happened is not in any shape, way, or form the victim or survivor's fault, but holding the offenders accountable for what had happened. Organizing the service delivery to enhance evidence collection. There's been a lot of movement and talk recently about backlog of evidence collection, tips, and what have you. So a SART can really help address how is that being looked at. Building interagency relationships. This is, we have a previous or another webinar on the SART coordinator, but this would really fall onto the shoulders of a coordinator is really helping build relationships and bridges across many of the agencies that are within a SART. And building trust and collaboration within a SART. SART would not function without trust and collaboration occurring within. Otherwise, it really does become a meeting that folks show up to and nothing really results from it. And one anecdote that I can share is when I started out in this world back in the early 2000s, I became a member of the local sexual assault response team. And it was through that program that I was able to connect with the local SANE program, get to know the sex crime detectives and understand the landscape of the city within which I was working. It was transformational in terms of my capacity to support survivors better, being a part of that multidisciplinary team. And so those relationships are relationships that I still have today. And as you're thinking about what the SART can do, there are tangible things that you can do as a SART like develop policies, but there are also those intangibles and they are often relationships. They are often knowledge building around systems and how things work so that you can better serve survivors. And I think that is an important piece to consider when you're thinking about the role of a SART. So we just mentioned protocols. So that's a big one. You'll hear that a lot, that SARTs often develop processes and protocols to streamline responses across all disciplines. This is sometimes where suspicion can manifest because agencies, so prosecution, law enforcement, advocacy, whether that's systems-based or community-based and medical providers, there's this feeling that you're not going to tell me how I need to do my job. And so a protocol for response isn't necessarily the SART coordinator or a small group of people rewriting an agency's policies. It's more about pulling together all of those policies into one place, identifying if there are any gaps, fixing any of those gaps, streamlining services where perhaps something is too clunky and then creating one document that houses all of those protocols. They're not usually binding. That would be dependent on your community, but it's really just an acknowledgement that we are trying to work together and here is how our agency will handle things, which can be really helpful for a survivor or for someone who's looking into how best to understand the system. So a SART can also educate the community about available intervention and prevention services, those standards of practice. What does that look like? You know, how are we going to respond as a group of people to sex assault survivors, right? Are we going to commit to removing all victim-blaming language from our response? Are we going to commit to victim-centered, offender-focused process? Those kinds of things are what we mean when we say interagency standards of practice versus kind of a nitty-gritty protocol. Here's what happens when ABC happens. And then also case review, which is something that SARTs tend to do when they're a little bit more established, but is very, very important and something we would encourage you all to consider implementing. So where do you even start with all of this? You know you have a problem or you know you have something that you would like to accomplish, you want to build a SART, but what do you do first? We highly recommend coming up with a small group of stakeholders and determining who needs to be at the table. Now often what you'll hear are folks that are referred to as champions, but there's also folks that are influencers. So champions are folks that have formal power within agencies. So this may be your police chief, your executive director, someone along those lines that can really make a decision for an entire agency. But what's an influencer? An influencer is someone with informal power, but people believe in them. And we have found that influencers are key when you're building a SART because they're the ones that folks within an agency will talk to. And if that influencer believes in the SART and can talk it up, you will see a culture change. You know, agency change can happen, but folks don't necessarily buy into it. When you have an influencer that is also working towards that goal, that's when you'll start to see that culture shift. Also, you want to identify who needs to be at the table. So that again falls back onto determining do you need the champions, the influencers, or maybe you need a mix of both. We have found that a mix tends to be the best solution because if a SART is identifying problems and coming up with solutions, but you don't have those folks there that can implement change, that won't necessarily work. However, it doesn't, again, necessarily work if the agency doesn't buy into it. You also want to look into relationship development with each of the agencies that are participating in SART. And lastly, you really should look at whether or not you are rural or urban in your community when developing your SART as both of these have both pros and cons. There's a lot that we could say about rural and urban and things to consider. And it's part of why we don't have a cookie cutter roadmap for you in terms of establishing a SART and developing those foundations because it really does manifest differently depending on your community, the size of your community, the history of your community. Has your community been one that's fairly progressive in terms of understanding sex assault and wanting to do something about it? Or is it a community that believes there's no sex assault that happens there? So those factors really do play into how you establish the SART and in some cases make those champions slash influence the people really, really critical. But thinking about, you know, urban environments may have more resources but they may have less relationships, right? There may not be as much friendliness between agencies because maybe there are more agencies or there are more people. And so it's just harder to have those stronger relationships. In a smaller community, a lot of people know each other, which can be a good and a bad thing, right? It can be that there's really strong relationships and so you have some key influences and it's easy to persuade people or it could be that there are some deep-seated conflicts that go back a long time that you have to negotiate before you can really move forward with your SART. So these are all things you just need to think about when you're starting out. Another thing to think about is what are the perceived barriers? So when you have this small group of people who've come together, three or four people who are looking at establishing a SART, it's really important to identify what barriers are perceived in your community to establishing a successful SART. So identifying them and then trying to address them. Moshe talked about the champions and influences. These are really key as you think about it. If you have a law enforcement agency who is perhaps disinterested in participating in the SART but there's a sergeant in that law enforcement agency who's super popular and is really bought in for the idea of a SART, then that sergeant is going to be really helpful as you start to engage, you know, the deputy chief or the chiefs in that department or the sheriff to be able to get the agency to buy in. And so thinking strategically about how best to approach agencies will be a part of this. Remember that the SART can't just be another meeting without structure and purpose. We have so many meetings on our calendars and it's really easy to ditch a meeting that you think has no value in your life. And so it's really critical that you think about the SART beyond just another meeting that doesn't really achieve much. And so this is connected to having a good, strong SART coordinator to help facilitate those meetings and move things forward between the meetings. And there's another webinar that you can listen to that Gosher and I did about the SART coordinator if you wanna learn more about that position. It can be a first step, not always. It definitely should be an early step. So thinking about who your coordinator is gonna be. So when you are looking to develop a SART, excuse me, it's important to determine who could be potential members for you. And again, remember that not all these folks may join. Initially you may identify them down the line or they may start to hear about this and ask to join. That's always a fun way to do it. You don't have to hunt anyone down. But we have identified law enforcement, district attorneys, victim advocates, both system and community, SANE program or medical facility if you don't have a SANE program, probation, child welfare, judges, your crime lab, and schools. And for example, Title IX. We think it's really important to have both system and community-based agencies involved because this really helps out with transparency. It also allows your SART to keep a pulse on what's really happening within your community. We know that not every person reports with law enforcement. So the community-based advocacy agencies are important for that piece. But the community-based folks don't necessarily go through the entire criminal justice system so they don't necessarily see that side of the coin. So we've now broken up. Our next three slides are gonna offer kind of what we think would be good first-stage components, second-stage components, and third-stage components, thinking about your implementation as a step-by-step process. Again, to reiterate, you don't wanna rush the implementation of a SART. You wanna be thoughtful and strategic about how you do this. Move slowly. But I say that and then also think that some communities are able to just move more quickly if there's less people involved, right? So you can judge that based on your own climate and culture. But the goal here would be to think about a house, right? A house with a poor or weak foundation is going to be susceptible to falling down. And so you really wanna make sure that you're developing a strong foundation for your SART because that will set it up for success and for a long-term success. And for longevity, as you think about kind of moving through the steps and thinking about it in the future. So Gosha and I put into the first stage thinking about hiring a coordinator. Now, obviously there's a financial piece attached to hiring a coordinator. So you might be needing to have even like a free first stage where you're looking at grant funding opportunities or you're looking at agencies who are bought into establishing a SART and can they each chip in a piece, a financial piece to help support having a coordinator. Initially, perhaps you have the coordinator as someone in your agency and they're doing another job and then they have 10 hours or so just initially to get the SART started. But we would not recommend that be your ongoing practice because that can become really difficult as the SART establishes its identity and as the workload increases. So we are strongly in favor of standalone SART coordinators who are a neutral party. But understanding that there are financial constraints, you might have to be flexible about that in the beginning. Establishing regular meeting times, this is really important to not have a loosey-goosey schedule to ensure that there is a time where it happens whether that's quarterly or monthly or bimonthly and making sure that you stick to that. One structure that we've seen is to have co-chairs. So there is a SART coordinator but there are two members of the committee of the SART who act as co-chairs which then kind of embeds leadership within the SART members which can also help with identity and also help with buy-in. And so the SART coordinator is there, they do follow-up, they do administrative work, they are building relationships, they're developing trainings but the co-chairs are running the meetings. And then the co-chairs and the coordinators meet regularly to make sure that the SART is on track. Developing mission, vision, and values early on would be important, making sure that those mission, vision, and values come from within the group versus an external person or group. Finding those champions and influences, developing some parameters around confidentiality. If you're gonna talk about cases in your SART, do you need to have everyone sign a confidentiality agreement and what does that look like? And then building relationships which is also kind of a pre-first stage as well. You need to have those relationships to really get off to a good start. Okay, so stage two. So as you're building your SART and you're beginning to build those relationships, it's really important that you don't just let those sit. You really wanna develop strong relationships. So that way if there is an issue or a problem that comes up, agencies and folks feel like they can reach out to others and address those without just sitting on that information. We've already discussed guidelines, protocols, and joint response policies, but we highly encourage if you don't do that in the first stage to do it in the second one and definitely revisit those as we have even noticed here in Colorado as laws change, as statutes come up, you need to revise these so that way they are up to date with the best practices. We also really encourage, this usually falls onto a SART coordinator role, but to develop a onboarding process for new members. Like I had mentioned, sometimes you can get to a point where your SART has agencies reaching out and asking if they can join. If you are able to accommodate them or if this is something that you're good to do, you really want to have an onboarding process so they understand what does your SART do and what would be expected of their agency if they were going to come on board. And determine who your regular members are. At the first stages, we typically see folks such as police chiefs, executive directors, those folks are attending at first, but once they have determined what the SART is and how their agency will interact with it, we have had many police chiefs who then appoint sergeants that attend SART meetings that are able to come back and relay that information at a command staff meeting, for example. The change is still able to be made at that agency, but it's not requiring the time of the police chief to attend. Okay, so our third stage component, and that could be a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh stage. We've just decided to do three stages here for simplicity. So when you have your regular meeting times, you've built some strong, sustainable relationships and you're nurturing those relationships in an ongoing way, and you have people regularly coming to your meetings, you have your policy, your protocol, and you're starting to identify gaps, one of the things that we would recommend is that you really think about evaluation. So there's a couple of things to think about here. So one is that you should be tracking data within your community and any system changes that are happening. So how many assaults are being reported? How many medical forensic exams are being done if you have a program? Or if you don't have a program, how many survivors are choosing not to engage in the medical forensic exam process because it's too far, right? How many cases are being presented to the DA and how many cases are being filed? What are the outcomes of those cases? Actually starting to track some of that information so that you can better identify gaps as a team. And then the other piece would be how effective is your SART, right? So doing some internal investigation and evaluation about member satisfaction and the goals and the vision and the values that you set in those earlier stages. Are you actually meeting those and are you feeling effective or are you feeling like you're spinning your wheels as a group without much direction? So the evaluation piece, I think, is something that often gets lost and forgotten and we would argue that it's very, very important for a sustainable SART. And also to recognize when you have successes, right? And to be able to celebrate those successes and share data that demonstrates that things are changing and they're changing for the better. Case review is another huge piece of this. And when we think about case review, we don't think about it in the sense of someone shares the story of a case and then there's no discussion, right? When we think about case review, we would ideally recommend that it's actually a dissection of the case and each person presents their part and then there's group discussion to identify what went really well and what could have been improved. Because the whole purpose of a case review, in our opinion, is that it seeks to make us better at what we do. But you could end up having a three or four step process to get to that point because you need to have a lot of trust between players at the table to be able to get to that point. And I do wanna quickly mention, in terms of case reviews, there is alternatively a few SARTs that we have seen that do real-time case reviews with their district attorney's office, meaning that instead of going to a traditional filing, they actually bring that case to the SART and present it there and the district attorney's office will make that determination of whether they file or decline at the SART meeting. Again, pros and cons to this. However, it does lend itself to some transparency because with everyone at the table there and witnessing this, it really provides an opportunity for folks to explain their investigative processes. The DAs have an opportunity to explain why or why didn't they file the case. And community advocates can listen in and perhaps are able to give victim survivors information that they otherwise may not have. So I just wanted to point out that's another case review that you can consider. Yeah, and actually it made me think of another structure that we've seen with sex assault response teams is that you have these larger task forces or interagency councils that are primarily information sharing and training-based and they meet less frequently. And then you have a much smaller group of people that meet every couple of weeks or every month and they do the case reviews. So the case review isn't done in the large group. It's done in a smaller group with the key players around the table from each of the agencies. Because some of the SARTs here in Colorado are 50 people strong, right? They're really thriving. But that's not a forum where you could probably do an effective case review if you're really trying to dissect what happened and do a better job next time. And so the other piece that I'll just throw in because I just thought of it is that there's also conversation around whether you do case review on open cases or closed cases. And we have a mixed bag in Colorado. Some SARTs will only do closed cases for review and as Gosha just described, there are also examples of ones where the cases are open. So other third stage components include grant funding, seeking grant funding. How can you expand your services? How could you perhaps move your coordinator from part-time to full-time? How are you gonna sustain your program over the long haul? What buy-in do you need? What things need to change in your community to ensure its sustainability? And then training opportunities. So what are the gaps you've identified in your evaluation or in your discussions between agencies and how can you provide training to better educate folks who are connected to this process and move forward from that place? So I know that Gosha through her SART has offered the forensic experiential trauma interviewing, FETI training to a number of people who are connected and that's been really successful. Yeah. So I think what we also wanna stress here is that while we've laid this out as one, two, three and maybe there's four, five, six, it isn't necessarily a linear process. You might find yourself jumping between these components. The work of a SART is always ongoing. It does evolve over time. You may need to revisit steps from earlier and I think one of the critical pieces is that your SART is nimble and responsive to community needs. The evaluation piece is such a core element of the work of a SART in terms of knowing if you're meeting your goals and then being able to reevaluate and shift as necessary. Best practices emerge and it's really important to stay on top of those so that your community can adapt and grow and respond more effectively to survivors of sexual assault and hold offenders accountable. And the SART is such a clear vehicle to do this. It just sometimes can get a bit muddy because there are relationships involved and there is conflict and you just have to do a good job in setting those foundations to be strong so that you can move through those rocky times that are likely at some point. Did you wanna add anything, Gosha, to wrap up? No, yeah. So thank you all for sitting in on this webinar. We hope that you found this to be informational. Our contact information is here. Please, please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or comments. Lisa and I are both passionate about the work that SARTs do and feel that they are so valuable, not only for our communities but across the nation. So if you have anything that you would like to reach out to us for, we are happy to help you in this work. Great, thank you so much for a really informative presentation. We really appreciate it. Here are some references that they mentioned throughout their presentation. And I just wanna again iterate that NSV is a national technical assistance provider. We're really happy if you reach out to us with any questions, comments, concerns about any aspect of sexual assault work. Our email is here as well as a website link with a link to the SART Toolkit. And a lot of the things that were covered in today's webinar have expanded information in the SART Toolkit. It is going to be a first-stop shop for most SARTs. And in the SART Toolkit, there actually are expanded sections on evaluation, on sustainability, with specific resources that go through that. So I'd really recommend, particularly if those things popped out at you today, to refer to those. And again, I just wanna say thank you to our presenters. We really appreciate you being here and sharing all your experiences. And again, thank you to OVC for their support in developing this webinar, as well as all the materials in the Sexual Assault Toolkit. Thank you. Well, I hope that you enjoyed that webinar on the foundations of a SART. There's a lot to think about as you're getting up and running. One of the most important things is that SART is not right for every community, or it's not right right now for every community. So revisiting those questions, or revisiting some of the basic building blocks, if you decide now is not the right time, is always a good thing to do. I think that if you are gonna start a SART, if you try to say that 10 times fast, it's really good to make sure that you have the building blocks and the communication channels open that set you up for success. It is hard work. And so make sure that those are in place. Again, if you have any questions, we are more than happy to help. And there are a lot of resources available to you to make sure that you're all set. One of the biggest, I don't wanna say biggest, it really depends on where your team is, how well they work together, and really what the common understanding is. So one of the things that comes up a lot on SART teams is confidentiality. And this can be a challenge regardless of what discipline you are or how you're looking at this, because each discipline really does have something that they can or cannot share, can or cannot share with the team or with different individuals at different times in a whole process of supporting a victim. And so I just wanna bring this up here, and we're gonna dive into another session specifically on confidentiality, because this is really critical. And frequently that relationship piece is really important, but also the practicalities around who can share what when, but understanding why someone else at the table might not be sharing something, or why they might be saying something in a specific manner. If they're trying to give aggregate information without disclosing something about a specific survivor, you might be hearing some things that make it a little bit more challenging to act, or a little bit more challenging to be responsive, or you want more information than what they're sharing in order to make decisions you need to make for your role. And so, this comes up not infrequently, but again, I think the more that you have training on whatever it is that may cause conflict, or that normally might cause conflict, but people just don't understand because they don't do your job every day, the more successful your SART will be, and the easier the conversations will be as you move forward as a team, respecting the professional boundaries and laws that guide the work that any person sitting at that table do with enforced survivors, that will be really, really helpful for you as a team moving forward. Because I really do believe everybody who sits around that table really does have good intentions about doing the best job that they can, and understanding each other's roles, and the rules and legislation that guide those roles can be really helpful to centering that belief that everybody there is really trying to do their best, and you can do better work together when you all start from that foundation. So, again, without... Hello, I'm Christina Prezenty from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, and I'm happy to welcome you to the webinar, Confidentiality for SART. This webinar provides a deep dive into confidentiality and privacy related to supporting victims and working as a team. This is one of many webinars you can find in the SART toolkit at www.nscrc.org slash S-A-R-T-T-O-O-L-K-I-T, and in the SART webinar series. The SART webinar series will be available on YouTube. We would like to thank the Office for Victims of Crime for their support and funding of this webinar and the entire SART toolkit, and additional supplemental materials. We would also like to offer the disclaimer that the opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed are those of the contributors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the United States Department of Justice. I'm really glad that our presenter, Sarah Layden of the Confidentiality Institute, could join us today, and we'd like to turn it over to Sarah for their introduction and their presentation, but again, I just want to show you the website, and again, that's on the screen right here, www.nscrc.org slash SARTtoolkit. With that, I will hand it over to you, Sarah. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you. Hello, everyone. My name is Sarah Layden. I am an Associate Trainer for the Confidentiality Institute, which is a technical assistance and training program that helps nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and educational institutions to solve confidentiality challenges. I'll also add that I have been doing sexual assault victim advocacy work for the last decade, where I'm a director at a rape crisis program located in Chicago, Illinois. I participate in a multidisciplinary team like a SART, and I know firsthand how tough confidentiality can be in these spaces. Keep in mind, as we have this discussion about confidence within SARTs, that we are talking about confidentiality, which is a big umbrella. Individual jurisdictions should be aware of exceptions to confidentiality by profession, victim characteristics like age, emancipation status, competency level or disability, and applicable state or federal law. It is up to each SART to dive into their local circumstances and implication for various victims. The SART toolkit, as mentioned, has more resources and tools for SARTs to access the information locally. And with that, let's dive in. I would like you to think of all the reasons why confidentiality is important to our clients in our daily work. Aside from ethical and legal obligations, which we will get into in just a moment, confidentiality increases victim autonomy, emotional and physical safety, as well as decreases personal or societal consequences such as discrimination at work or alienation from family or community. Because they can control who and how the information they share is used, this increases the likelihood that victims will seek support and fosters the restoration of control in their life. But what exactly is confidentiality? Confidentiality is a general umbrella term for how we conduct ourselves and our services with the sensitive and private information learned from our clients. It is helpful when thinking about confidentiality to break this down into three concepts, privacy, confidentiality, and privilege. But first, what does privacy mean? This is the right to a personal choice, the victims in this situation, on who and how much information to disclose. The survivor decides what information they want to share and with whom about the harm that they have suffered. This is similar to the decisions we all make daily about who and what we share about our personal lives with others. I may be comfortable sharing something private with my best friend, per se, and not a coworker. Even with friends and family, there may be things we intend to keep private from them and everyone. Victims determine the privacy of their information. They navigate this in every communication with what they feel comfortable sharing. Second, confidentiality, again used as an umbrella term for these concepts, is the responsibility, typically legally or ethically, to protect someone else's privacy. The professional, in this example, you as the advocate, has this duty. Confidentiality means you respect the victim's choice about whether to share information, which means you share it when the victim asks you to do so and don't share it if you don't know what the victim wants. Last, privilege, often used interchangeably with confidentiality, is a legal rule of evidence prohibiting the disclosure of private information against someone's will, meaning that there is legal standing that no one can make you share information without the victim's permission. Some states have privilege codified in statute and others do not. Even if you do not have privilege to fight, say, a subpoena for records, you still have a duty to keep information confidential, which means you always need a survivor's permission to share any information about them. Without privilege, however, you do not have a legal rule that protects disclosure of private information against the victim's will, but you still have an ethical duty to protect the information. This includes even confirming or denying that someone is a client. In SARTs, the benefits of confidentiality to victims also exist with regard to safeguarding client information. In addition to fostering safety and autonomy, confidentiality helps to assure appropriate exchanges of information that protect victims from exposure to systems they do not wish to engage in or from scrutiny by providers who may not have trauma-informed survivor-centered practices in place. Even with well-intentioned providers, confirming knowledge about a victim that the victim did not directly share with you understandably feels like an invasion of personal privacy. This is the case anytime anybody knows something about someone that they didn't hear directly from that person. For the providers on a SART, all of which have different access points to interactions with victims, maintaining client confidentiality increases trust of individual service providers engaged in sexual assault response. In turn, when individual providers are trusted, this can increase the victim's engagement with follow-up care, referrals to other providers, or engagement with other systems. In addition to the benefits to victims, nearly all SART team members have their own legal requirements on how and what they may share with other providers. As SARTs are newly forming, or even for SARTs that have operated for some time, it is important to have a clear understanding of each member's ability to share information and what this may look like in participating on the SART. The Violence Against Women Act, Victims of Crime Act, and the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act all contain strong confidentiality provisions that limit the sharing of victims' personally identifying information, including entering information into public records and databases. There is an exception where victim service providers share if there is a statutory or court mandate, an example, mandated reporting of child abuse. These provisions affirm confidentiality practices that protect the safety and privacy of victims of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. VAWA, the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, and VOCA regulations prohibit sharing personally identifying information about victims without informed, written, and reasonably time-limited consent. Other entities on the SART have other rules or may even have other reporting obligations that could be triggered by SART discussions. An example, there is an exception to these rules for law enforcement and prosecutors that may be VAWA-funded on SART, in that law enforcement can share information as it is appropriate for them to share to do their law enforcement job. That is not, however, an exception that victim service providers can share information with law enforcement. Additionally, medical providers on the SART have their own confidentiality standards under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA. In order to understand how to navigate confidentiality in a SART, it is important to set the methodology of your SART from the onset of its formation, as the exception of what information is shared varies on this intention. SARTs generally form in order to do minimally one of three things, and sometimes even all three. In a case management SART, SARTs engage in conversations about open cases in order to ensure coordination leading to timely and victim-centered response and investigation. An example, let's say that law enforcement responded to a sexual assault at a home they had been to several times prior due to domestic violence, and in the last instance, the abuser choked the victim who was pregnant after he sexually assaulted her, the victim lost consciousness, and the offender fled. Providers meet to discuss the medical care provided to her, evidence collection, the follow-up of law enforcement in finding the abuser, the coordination of an advocate assisting in a protective order, and other needs such as shelter and new child care options for other shared children that are safe. Next, in a case review model, there is a review of closed cases from start to finish to identify gaps and successes of systems response, as well as measure effectiveness of interagency protocols. This can result in changes in policy, training, and procedures. For example, a review of a 2014 case is done in which a victim reported an assault to law enforcement, and they did not believe her. A few years later, this offender's DNA gets to another evidence collection kit in CODIS, and he is arrested on the prior sexual assault. In the interim of him being arrested, he had nearly three other reports filed against them. The team talks about what occurred in the first report and in the latter reports, in addition to how the CODIS hit was obtained and how the case was charged and prosecuted. They discuss legal rules around multiple victims and the end guilty verdict, in addition to planning on how they can circumvent something like this from happening again. In a systems consultation model, this generally occurs when SARTs are reacting to the failure of a system to respond appropriately. This type of review can also lead to changes in policy, training, and procedures to improve overall response. These reviews generally don't need victim information, as they are more focused on services received. For example, your prosecutor's office discusses a few cases where there was a suspected drug-facilitated sexual assault and how no urine sample was obtained by the hospital staff, therefore hindering meeting the burden of proof at trial. Whatever the method or intention of your SART, this should be laid out from the onset in an effort to decide what and how information is shared in these spaces. Confidentiality and navigating it occurs daily in doing advocacy work. Acting on behalf of our clients is the essence of what we do. Navigating this can be tricky. It is easy to pay attention to confidentiality for task-oriented work, such as getting a case update from a prosecutor or working with a hospital to schedule a follow-up appointment. What becomes complicated in SARTs is how to navigate legal and ethical obligations while maintaining effective advocacy to improve response to victims. Not all professionals on the SART team will be confidential professionals. In fact, some very much will not be, like law enforcement and prosecutors. The trick in a SART is having the confidential professionals respect that others will not come from a place of confidentiality and that they can still be survivor-centered, and for non-confidential professionals to respect the confidential professional's duty not to volunteer information. In order to do this in the most effective way, it is imperative that SART members abide by the following framework. Know first any state or federal laws that govern confidentiality. Remember, there is a difference between privacy, confidentiality, and privilege in individual state laws. Victims and partners must also be informed from the very beginning of engagement with you or any other system how the information they share will be used and or shared with others. This also means understanding other systems' confidentiality procedures and regulations. Keep this in mind while doing work with law enforcement, detention centers, schools, and hospitals. PREA, Title IX, and HIPAA may limit confidentiality, making access to confidential resources all the more important. Plan how will those on the teams navigate confidentiality, when may potential breaches of confidentiality occur, and how can those be mitigated? How will you ensure service coordination in a case management model if you are not able to release information without written consent from a survivor? How will you do systems-based advocacy if signing a release could have implications on accessing your records later on? How will you share information with those on your team, like a prosecutor, that may be obligated to share the information with the defendant? These are all issues that need to be explored and resolved by members of your SART. This not only plans for safeguards on confidentiality, but also in ensuring that team members understand limits on what you are able to share and do not attribute these limits to lack of collaboration. In addition, it is important to plan who from your agency will be on the SART. Oftentimes, it is effective to have advocates that have not had direct contact with these cases discussed be a part of the team to safeguard the potential for confidential information to be shared unintentionally. And lastly, pause. Pause before speaking in meetings and think about the above. How can you do effective advocacy while maintaining confidentiality? And don't worry, we have some tips for you in just a few more slides. Keep in mind what may trigger confidential information. Are you identifying the survivors of a certain race, community, or neighborhood? Even in SART discussions, there should be a member of the team that keeps an eye on potential confidentiality breaches and can pause the conversation when needed. Many people get confused and think if you sign a SART confidentiality agreement, or MOU, that somehow changes what victim service providers are allowed to share without getting instructions from the victim. It does not. MOUs do not replace legal obligations of any SART member. MOUs should work to outline agency rules, regulations, and protocols around confidentiality and discuss how they will be navigated. Remember, confidentiality is an ethical and legal obligation. Under state and federal law, it is the survivor that controls who and how information is released. Additionally, under VAWA, a victim should not be forced to sign a release as a condition of service. This means that programs who aim to review cases on a SART should not implement the standard practice of victims waiving confidentiality. The group should also not get confused between a confidentiality promise to a victim, which includes not sharing information with the SART unless you have their permission, and the confidentiality agreement of the group, which means what we are legally allowed to share in the SART group stays within the SART group. As we discussed, there are legal exceptions to that group agreement, and even if the group itself is one of confidence, sharing information you are not able to is not protected legally and violates the victim's privacy rights. You can agree to keep the discussion of your SART private between the group members, but also keep in mind that this has no impact on your legal obligations related to your clients. Second, keep in mind confidentiality and turnover. People transition out of roles, and all SARTs should assure that protocols are clearly documented and discuss what onboarding and transition will look like when members transition into new roles or leave agencies. Note that consistent participation from the same team members are essential to the success of a SART, and transitions on who participates should be limited for the success of the team. These are difficult conversations and establishing rapport and trust between members takes time, but it's also critical to the success of your team. Additionally, assuring that there is top level support from each agency involved is also crucial to the SART success. I get it. Confidentiality can feel like a real barrier to true collaboration and genuine conversations with institutional partners, but it doesn't have to be. Partners that understand your role as an advocate will understand with some education the limits of what you can share, when, and how. Oftentimes, you can convey what you need to without identifying information or sharing direct communication you've had with survivors. You also do not want to sign a waiver every time a case is being discussed in a SART. This can have implications to accessing your records later on. Specify which professions or categories of professions are impacted by which rules or the need to keep which things to themselves when establishing your SART. While setting the intention or methodology of your SART, choosing whether you're going to do a case review model, case management, or a systems consultation model, you also need to address what the expected outcomes or goals are of this process. Is the goal to change a charging decision or for police to make an arrest where they chose not to? Is the goal to increase overall arrests and or prosecution rates or referrals to support services? Setting these goals is essential to managing the expectations of SART members, establishing the tone of meetings, and will determine how you communicate to your clients about the SART and to your partner. While increasing the efficiency of medical response, arrests, and prosecutions are essential to measuring overall success of SART, keep in mind not every victim may want to engage in these processes. What do SARTs look like for a victim who only wanted medical care? How are they linked up with services or provided information on how, when they are ready, if they are ever ready? They can engage in services at a time that's right for them. Additionally, setting the goal of changing charging or arrest decisions alone could create an adversarial tone to SART meetings. Again, while this should be measured as an outcome, a SART should have the overall goal of procedural justice. This is the idea of fairness in the process, which means ensuring that people are treated fairly, harm is reduced, options and information is provided, and choice is afforded. In setting the goal of your SART and having clearly explained processes and procedures, advocates are able to communicate fairly and accurately about their local SART to clients if this is permitted. This is an important decision that SARTs must make about the confidence of group discussions within the SART. Does the SART group confidentiality agreement allow or prohibit the advocate or any other professional to discuss with the victim what happened in the SART? The expectation and rules about this should be made very clear from the onset. If discussion with your client is permitted, be sure to explain the purpose of SARTs that aim to change an arrest or charging decision versus ones that are solely aimed to identify systemic issues for training or engage in case management coordination. If the intention of your SART is to change a charging decision, victims should be informed that their case is being reviewed for this purpose. Managing expectations of the outcome is also necessary. An example, you could inform your client that your local law enforcement office wants to discuss their case to improve systems response and inform training. You could ask your client how or in what way they want to participate in this discussion, pending that this has been agreed upon and there is a clear protocol in place for how a victim may participate in this process. Remind your client that you will not share any information about them or even confirm they are a client if they do not want you to. It is essential to remind your client of their rights with regard to confidentiality as well as any mandated reporting laws that exist. So clients are always making informed decisions about what to share, when, and with whom. Follow up with them about the outcome of the discussion if this is permitted by your SART. The sergeant wants to use your case in a training module. How do you feel about that? Or after a review of your case, the prosecutor is going to contact you about evidence they believe was missed. If a victim agrees that you may share information about their case, this must be clearly outlined in a time-limited written release. An example, say your client had a horrible experience with a responding officer or nurse and wants you to be able to share that's why they never called their detective back. You would need to assure the waiver includes the release of only this information. An example, you, the advocate, is authorized to discuss in case review on August 23rd with Dave Detective, Patty Prosecutor, and Nurse Nancy, the conversation had with Roger responding officer when he came to your local hospital on August 2nd. Assure you limit the time release. So for example, in this one, this would expire the next day, August 24th. Also assure your client understands the implications of this waiver and potential access to records later on. Even if a waiver is signed, you always have the duty to keep your client's information confidential. An important thing to remember about waivers of confidentiality, even when limited in scope and time, is that they may have implication on protecting records later on. Again, knowing the laws in your state will help understand the potential for these implications. There is a variety of ways to do effective advocacy without a release in a SART. Remember that it is often easier for advocates who have not had experience with a case to speak more broadly on issues. However, some examples advocates can use in SARTs or in their daily work include, you could address poor victim treatment by stating that in your own experience and not a specific victim. Follow-up from detectives takes weeks, which deters victims, or that you have had to repeatedly call a district to even find out who someone's detective was. Remember that names of detectives or nurses are also not important in these meetings. Look to the system and the process and identify your concerns related to that. Individual concerns about specific people and systems should be conveyed one-on-one with their supervisor and not in a SART meeting. You can also share generalities. If it is apparent to you that a hospital needs training, say on HIV prophylactic treatment, you do not have to specify that the case being reviewed didn't have this offered if you know that. You could highlight this by saying, I'm noticing that HIV meds aren't documented as a medical record. Were these ever given? Knowing fully well they were not. After, you could mention that this seems to be a common practice from this hospital. Additionally, let's say you know your client has evidence that wasn't followed up on. This same approach may work. In the report, it states that this victim's sister was in the house, but I don't see a reference to her being interviewed. Was she? Or I see the victim's cell phone was scanned for evidence, but I don't see that the person who harmed them was. Was it? What prevented this from occurring? In closing, best practice in sexual assault, domestic violence, and stalking is moving more and more towards multidisciplinary teams and SARTs. In order to prepare for the way in which you or a member of your agency can participate in these efforts, understand state and federal law applicable to you and others on your SART. State coalitions are great resources for this. Take time to thoughtfully plan the goals of your SART and make sure that you are engaging with what you have discovered from your research. In addition, assure that there is consistency on who participates on your SART and implications on any pause moments where nabbing confidentiality may be tricky. Contact others who are also experts in confidentiality and SART information. Additionally, remember that this training was based on the great resource created by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center and their SART team. I also have some other resources for you. The Victims' Rights Law Center has lots of resources for professionals on confidentiality, including their really terrific state-specific guides on privacy laws impacting survivors, which can be found at the link on this slide. The VRLC also has an OVW grant to provide confidentiality training for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. The VRLC also has an OVW grant to provide confidentiality training to provide confidential technical assistance to world programs and legal service providers specifically and can give assistance on any confidentiality questions. The National Network to End Domestic Violence and the Confidentiality Institute's Confidentiality Toolkit is also a great resource and provides a variety of tools and frequently asked questions directed at ALBAWA, Family Violence Prevention and Service Act, and VOCA-funded service providers. The National Network to End Domestic Violence also has an OVW grant to provide confidentiality technical assistance to all OVW grantees and potential grantees and can give assistance on any confidentiality questions. Sometimes I think that there's a misperception that the VRLC is the go-to for sexual assault providers and the National Network to End Domestic Violence is the go-to only for domestic violence providers. The truth is they both provide excellent assistance to all anti-violence service providers. I've also included another resource for you on confidentiality and safeguarding it with online services and online documentation. And with that, Christina, I will hand it back over to you. Thank you so much, Sarah. I really appreciate you being here to share all that information. I found it useful and I certainly hope that this is a great resource for SARTs, for individual members and to listen to as a team. I also appreciate you mentioning all those great resources where folks can go for technical assistance. Making those connections with technical assistance providers is huge. It's a great way to always make sure that your SART and your service agency has the most up-to-date information based on current best practices. And with that, I'll tell you again, NSVRC, or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, is a great resource, is a good technical assistance provider and our information is here. Again, the website and the link for the SART toolkit is there and we don't have an answer. We work very closely with a lot of other national sexual assault assistance providers and we will be really happy to connect you with the great folks who would have that answer. And with that, I wanna share with you Sarah and Alicia's information at the Confidentiality Institute and Sarah, I'll send it back to you. Thank you so much. Please feel free to contact me through the Confidentiality Institute if you have any other questions or need any more information about what I've shared today. You can email Alicia Aiken at aliciaattheconfidentialityinstitute.org who can put you in touch with me. Thank you so much and good luck to each of you as you're forming your SART teams locally. Great, and again, I just wanna thank OVC for supporting this project and remind folks that there is a whole webinar series that is part of the SART toolkit. So hopefully you found this one interesting and informative. Please check out those other ones as well. And thank you to everyone who was here with us today. Well, great. I hope that you found that as useful as I do. Revisiting some of the basics can be critical no matter where you are in your SART journey, especially if there's turnover and transition, right? They were not part of the foundation of setting up your SART. They don't have the same information as everybody else at the table. So a good tip is whatever your foundational principles are, your documents, to make sure that those are accessible to everyone on the team and that you're revisiting those on a regular basis, whether it's annually or every other year. It's really, really important, again, just to make sure that you all remain on the same page and continue really healthy working relationships. The work is hard enough, so whatever we can do to support each other and keep those relationships strong is really critical. So we're at this slide here, and I just want to invite you again, if you have questions, if you have comments, if you want additional information on anything that we covered today, please feel free to reach out to us. The best person to contact at the International Association of Forensic Nurses about SART questions is Shea. She's the grant manager on this project, and she will make sure that you get to the best person on staff here, the best forensic nurse, to answer your questions. Thank you all so much for being here today. We really, really appreciate your time. I hope that this information was useful and that you check out the SART toolkit when you do have questions. It's a very helpful resource. Have a great day, and thank you for all that you do.

Sexual Assault Response Team

SART

National Sexual Violence Resource Center

SART toolkit

YouTube channel

webinars

International Association of Forensic Nurses

Online Learning Center

forensic nurse specialists

establishing a SART

confidentiality in a SART

guidelines and protocols