Sexual assault survivors will have a private room for help at UF Health Shands Hospital by the end of the year.
Alachua County Commissioners approved the $32,000 renovation this month. The room will be located around the corner from the emergency room waiting area, said Laura Kalt, the director of the Alachua County Victim Services and Rape Crisis Center.
“This is a game changer for people in our community who are victims of sexual assault,” she said.
About six sexual assault nurse examiners, who collect evidence of the assault and interview survivors, will work in the room, she said. The nurses help them through the examination process, in which they may experience different levels of stress or emotion.
“A lot of victims can internalize those normal reactions as ‘Something’s wrong with me,’ instead of ‘What I’m going through is normal,’” Kalt said.
Currently, sexual assault survivors can end up waiting hours in the emergency room with other patients. They’re seen by whichever doctor or nurse is available.
About 150 survivors came to the emergency room in 2015, Kalt said.
With the private room, she hopes more survivors will seek medical treatment.
Angelique Stout, a 34-year-old sexual assault survivor treated at Shands, agreed.
On July 3, 2011, Stout was waiting for the bus outside the Copper Monkey on West University Avenue when a man offered to give her a ride home. Instead he took her to a then-abandoned lot behind Butler Plaza before assaulting her.
She managed to escape and roamed the woods for three hours before the police found her and brought her to the emergency room.
Covered in bruises and with almost no clothes on, Stout sat in the waiting room for about 15 minutes. A hospital intern saw her and demanded she be brought to a room for trauma patients.
“I never forgot that. That just makes me so emotional,” Stout said, her voice breaking. She said she wished she could have used the private room, adding that being alone to process would’ve helped the healing begin.
“It was almost sacred,” she said of the time alone in the trauma patient room.
While she is healing, Stout said she is ecstatic that Shands will have a private room and future survivors will have the opportunity to be alone in a safe environment.
“I just think it is one of the most beneficial things they could offer,” she said. “Better late than never.”
