Community Lobbying for 24/7 Rape Kit Testing at Local Hospital

We’ve been lobbying the province hard for this – is the ability to do rape kit testing 24/7 at our hospital, and also to create that ability for Whistler and Pemberton. We’ve finally got that service by taking dollars from another program, but it only runs from 8:30 to 4:30, Monday to Friday, which is not generally the time when women are sexually assaulted. And it is a huge barrier to reporting because women have to get in a police car and go down to the Lower Mainland to have this evidence collected. It’s traumatic and they’d rather not. So that is one area where we have been lobbying the Ministry of Health, and we wouldn’t be the only rural community that feels that way. You can train nurses quite simply in how to do this properly and collect evidence and send it to where it needs to go. And that should happen in a woman’s home community, whether she’s here or in Dease Lake. So that I would say is just a simple fix. Not a lot of money, but super important.