Using telemedicine technology to increase child sexual abuse expertise among medical professionals: A grant proposal

The purpose of this project was to create a program at the Child Abuse Services Team (CAST) to extend CAST's child abuse expertise across the nation, identify potential funding sources, and complete a grant proposal to implement this program at CAST. An extensive literature review was performed to investigate the best way to extend that expertise. Telemedicine technology was found to be effective in extending CAST's medical expertise to victims of child sexual abuse (CSA) living in rural areas and medical professionals needing specialized training in CSA evaluations. Telemedicine would provide remote live CSA consultations via networked teleconferencing technology for medical practitioners. Telemedicine can also provide long-distance CSA evaluation training to medical practitioners needing experience or specialization in CSA. A pre- and post-test will be used to evaluate the program and to measure an increase of knowledge regarding child abuse evaluations in the participating medical practitioners.