The Need to Establish a Forensic Nursing Branch in the Headlines of Nursing Curriculum

Violence and its associated trauma are an increasing worldwide critical health problem, and the victims of violence necessitate the medical and forensic services. Forensic nursing is one of the new disciplines in this field, hence the aim of this study was to review the forensic nursing, its application and introduction of forensic nursing as new branches of nursing discipline. This study was a narrative review research by searching the key words like forensic nursing and nursing in PubMed, Ovid, Scopus, EMBASE, Medline and Elsevier and Iranian INLM databases without time limitation. The result showed that forensic nursing provided direct services to individual, consultation services to nursing, medical and law-related agencies, as well as providing expert court testimony in areas dealing with trauma and/or questioned death investigative processes, addressing the children and elderly abuse, care of prisoner patients and assessing death scenes. This field also had some branches; providing an appropriate health services by forensic nurses can have a pivotal role in care of individuals who were the victims of violence; not only decreases the long term effect of abuses on physical and psychological aspect, but also prevent from being a victim of the violence. Therefore, the educational authorities should consider the necessity of designation the infrastructure required to provide forensic nursing and implementation of forensic nursing in health care systems.