evidence collection. These teams would be the military experts on clinical forensic examinations. Also during times of peace, forensic nurses must maintain their subspecialty skills. This is easily accomplished through seminars, collaboration with civilian counterparts, and appropriate billet assignments. CONCLUSIONS As Sekula13 states, “Health care personnel can no longer opt out of involvement in the process of assessing for victimization, proper collection of evidence, documentation of cases, and preservation of the chain of custody of evidence.” This same directive must be applied to military health care providers as well. Forensic nurses should be afforded the right to stand alongside fellow medical professionals in the military health care arena and be counted. Their contributions are already realized, but their potential has not been adequately explored. REFERENCES 1. Stevens S: Cracking the case: your role in forensic nursing. Nursing 2004; 34: 54–6. 2. 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Sexual assault victims often praise the compassionate services of Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners, and a new study of two SANE programs confirmed that they contribute to higher prosecution and conviction rates. The study focused on SANE programs in a large Midwestern county, carefully measuring how far sexual assault cases progressed through the criminal justice system during the years before and after the programs started. Researchers found statistically significant increases in various case progression measures, including the percentage of cases that eventually resulted in guilty pleas or convictions. Led by Rebecca Campbell, professor of psychology at Michigan State University, the research team looked at adult sexual assault cases treated in county hospitals and processed by the county’s five largest law enforcement agencies for the five years before the launch of the SANE programs. The researchers also looked at cases treated by SANE teams during their first seven years of operation. Campbell and her colleagues excluded cases that were not processed by the criminal justice system. These included stranger rape cases in which no perpetrator was ever identified as well as cases in which law enforcement officials concluded that the assault allegations were unfounded. This resulted in a sample of 156 preSANE cases and 141 post-