A Practical Guide To Forensic Nursing

Victims of violence are unfortunately ever-present in healthcare today. Regardless of the setting, nurses are often the first to interact with victims and regularly must step into uncomfortable or difficult situations. To ensure patient and provider safety and enable the best possible outcomes, every nurse should be well-versed in forensic and theoretical issues of violence. A Practical Guide to Forensic Nursing is an evidence-based guide to understanding and applying forensic nursing science. Authors Angela F. Amar and L. Kathleen Sekula introduce practical and theoretical perspectives on violence and provide valuable resources, including injury assessment and violence prevention strategies as well as an overview of relevant legal, ethical, societal, and policy issues. Whether you are a student, new nurse, or experienced clinician, you will find the right tools and strategies to broaden your understanding of violence and help you integrate forensic science into your patient care.

Interdisciplinary and holistic in approach, Forensic Nursing: A Handbook for Practice, Second Edition emphasizes collaborative practice and skill in caring for victims of violence and disaster. Focusing on how specific topics relate to forensic nursing, it examines human trafficking, sexual predators targeting children through the Internet, and elder abuse. Additionally, it explores workplace violence, cyber-bullying, and new developments in the field of biological evidence and DNA analysis.

The International Association of Forensic Nurses has developed The Core Curriculum for Forensic Nursing, First Edition, for nurses who aim to work in, and gain certification in the field. The book is well illustrated with full cover photographs and images vital to a solid understanding of forensic nursing. Written by the world's experts in forensic nursing, the Core Curriculum for Forensic Nursing offers a practical organization and writing style to help with subject mastery and retention.

You will find information about specific forensic topics, step-by-step procedures for retrieving and preserving evidence, and the best practices to follow to promote patient safety.

Written and edited by the most respected authorities in forensic nursing and forensic sciences, this new edition provides the tools and concepts you need to collect evidence that is admissible in court, determine the significance of that evidence, and provide accurate, reliable testimony while administering high-quality patient care. Now in full color throughout, it remains the most comprehensive, highly illustrated text of its kind. Provides a comprehensive, updated guide to forensic nursing science, paying special attention to the International Association of Forensic Nurses’s (IAFN) goals for forensic nursing. Retains a focus on assessment skills and the collection and preservation of evidence, following the established guidelines of the forensic sciences. Prepares you to provide testimony as a fact witness or a forensic nursing expert. Includes an illustrated case study in almost every chapter, helping you relate the information to clinical practice. Highlights important recommendations for interventions in Best Practice boxes, including the evidence base for each. Summarizes important points in Key Point boxes, so you can quickly review the most important concepts in each chapter. Explores the evolving role of forensic nurses in today’s health care facilities and the community. Edited by Virginia Lynch, founding member and first President of the International Association of Forensic Nurses and Janet Barber Duval, both well-respected pioneers and educators in the field. Contains 300 full-color illustrations integrated throughout the text, so you can view evidence quickly and easily, as it is likely to appear in practice. Presents information on courtroom testimony and depositions in one reorganized, streamlined chapter, giving you a full, organized treatment of this extremely important topic. Includes twelve new chapters: Digital Evidence, Medical Evidence Recovery at the Death Scene, Asphyxia, Electrical and Thermal Injury, Intrafamilial Homicide and Unexplained Childhood Death, Human Trafficking, Credential Development for Forensic Nurses, Gangs and Hate Crimes, Ethics Issues in Forensic Nursing, Forensic Physics and Fracture Analysis, Sexual Deviant Behaviors and Crime and Forensic Epidemiology. Contains heavily revised information on Prehospital Evidence, Forensic Investigation in the Hospital, and Human Abuse and Deaths in Custody. Features critical thinking questions with every case study, so you can thoroughly consider the implications of each clinical scenario. Evolve site will include appendices and additional documentation materials.

The forensic nurse has a powerful role in medical-legal investigations. Going beyond the nurse’s traditional role, forensic nurses are often at the forefront of evidence collection and preservation. They can maintain an evidentiary chain of custody, testify as an expert witness in a court of law, care for victims, assist victims’ families, and work with the community and law enforcement by providing educational programs. Forensic Nursing: A Concise Manual presents practical information directed at the range of activities that forensic nurses perform, offering guidelines for examining and correlating medical, psychological, ethical, and legal data specific to victims. The First Forensic Nursing Text to Offer a Full Range of Instructor’s Materials The book begins with an introduction to the fields of forensic nursing and forensic science. It discusses crime scene and death investigation, evidence collection, autopsies, legal issues, and ethics. It examines the nursing process as an organizational tool for identifying both the medical needs of the victim and the legal aspects of crime scene investigation. The authors pinpoint the role of the forensic nurse in an array of incident scenarios, including nursing home death, excited delirium syndrome, blunt and sharp force injuries, gunshot wounds, asphyxia, child abuse, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence. They also explore human trafficking and the forensic nurse’s role in mass disasters. Lastly, the book provides emergency room recommendations, discusses profiling and forensic anthropology, and offers guidance on working with grieving family members. Using a succinct outline format, the text is complemented by illustrative flowcharts and references in each chapter for further study. With contributions by notable forensic specialists, this volume shows the potential of this exciting new field and demonstrates how forensic nurses can make a difference in their communities and their profession.

This book provides both current and potential forensic nurses with a better understanding.

DNA testing and its forensic analysis are recognized as the “gold standard” in forensic identification science methods. However, there is a great need for a hands-on step-by-step guide to teach the forensic DNA community how to interpret DNA mixtures, how to assign a likelihood ratio, and how to use the subsequent likelihood ratio when reporting interpretation conclusions. Forensic DNA Profiling: A Practical Guide to Assigning Likelihood Ratios will provide a roadmap for labs all over the world and the next generation of analysts who need this foundational understanding. The techniques used in forensic DNA analysis are based upon the accepted principles of molecular biology. The interpretation of a good-quality DNA profile generated from a crime scene stain from a single-source donor provides an unambiguous result when using the most modern forensic DNA methods. Unfortunately, many crime scene profiles are not single source. They are described as mixed since they contain DNA from two or more individuals. Interpretation of DNA mixtures represents one of the greatest challenges to the forensic DNA analyst. As such, the book introduces terms used to describe DNA profiles and profile interpretation. Chapters explain DNA extraction methods, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), capillary electrophoresis (CE), likelihood ratios (LRs) and their interpretation, and population genetic models—including Mendelian inheritance and Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. It is important that analysts understand how LRs are generated in a probabilistic framework, ideally with an appreciation of both semicontinuous and fully continuous probabilistic approaches. KEY FEATURES: • The first book to focus entirely on DNA mixtures and the complexities involved with interpreting the results • Takes a hands-on approach offering theory with worked examples and exercises to be easily understood and implementable by laboratory personnel • New methods, heretofore unpublished previously, provide a means to innovate deconvoluting a mixed DNA profile, assign an LR, and appropriately report the weight of evidence • Includes a chapter on assigning LRs for close relatives (i.e., “It’s not me, it was my brother”), and discusses strategies for the validation of probabilistic genotyping software Forensic DNA Profiling fills the void for labs unfamiliar with LRs, and moving to probabilistic solutions, and for labs already familiar with LRs, but wishing to understand how they are calculated in more detail. The book will be a welcome read for lab professionals and technicians, students, and legal professionals seeking to understand and apply the techniques covered.