Retired Fraser Health nurse Sheila Early now joins a club with Canadians that includes Ryan Reynolds, Gord Downie, and Wayne Gretzky.
Last fall, Early received a call that she first thought was spam: it was from the Governor General’s office.
But it wasn’t spam, and she soon learned that she was a recipient of one of Canada’s highest civilian honours, the Order of Canada, for her leadership in forensic nursing over the past few decades. She
“I was stunned. Just unbelievable. And never imagined this type of honour being given to me,” Early told Daily Hive.
Early started B.C.’s first forensic nurse program in the early ’90s at the Surrey Memorial Hospital.
A couple of years prior, she was working in the emergency department as a nurse clinician when they received a complaint from a RCMP officer who had brought someone who had been sexually assaulted, but had a long delay in receiving care.
“That was the standard,” Early said. “‘Well, they’re not hurt, so we’ll just look after everybody else first.’”
But because of the complaint, Early was tasked with reviewing the patient’s chart, and she started digging into some of the research. She discovered that in the mid-70s, a group of U.S. nurses had started examining people who presented with sexual violence.
“And I thought, ‘It is 1992, and none of this has come to Canada,’” she said. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t this be a nice thing to have here? Wouldn’t that make a difference? Wouldn’t that mean that women and men and children — like this lady that I’m investigating — wouldn’t have to wait?’”
“And that became the beginning,” she said.
After putting together a proposal and applying for funding, Early co-founded what was then the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner program (now the Forensic Nursing Service) at Surrey Memorial Hospital.
In 1994, she was the first registered nurse to perform a sexual assault exam in B.C. She would later create the first forensic health sciences certificate program at BCIT and co-found the Canadian Forensic Nurses Association.
“Sheila’s work as a sexual assault nurse examiner and forensic nurse has had an extraordinary impact on the lives of countless victims of sexual violence,” said Winston Sayson, a former Crown Prosecutor, in a release.
“The thousands of individuals who received comfort, dignity and expert care as a direct result of her work bears testament to the difference she has made.”
What is forensic nursing?
Forensic nursing straddles three different areas: health care, law enforcement, and the legal system, Early explained.
While today it is commonly used in cases of sexual assault and violence, Early said the profession should be applied to other areas of health care, like mental health, car crashes, human trafficking, and elder mistreatment.
“Unfortunately, that’s the part that’s not always clear,” she said.
“Right now, the only people who get specialized care are those who have been involved in violence and trauma related to intimate partner violence, strangulation, sexual abuse in any form. So it’s not everybody.”