St Mary's Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC) — the UK's First, Manchester

St Mary's Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC) opened in 1986 at the old St Mary's Hospital in Manchester as the first centre of its kind in the UK, combining forensic medical examination, sexual health care, emergency contraception and counselling on one site, free of charge and accessible with or without a police report. The centre's team went on to create the Independent Sexual Violence Advisor (ISVA) role, which has since been adopted across the UK's national SARC network.
Published Trust figures for 2022/23 show the centre handling 2,831 adult referrals (1,898 new, 963 repeat) and 1,660 child referrals (1,043 new, 616 repeat) — roughly 4,491 people in a single year. Peer-reviewed evaluations, including a multi-year analysis of client feedback forms, found a large majority of clients reporting they were "very satisfied" with the crisis worker, forensic physician and police involved in their case; a separate published ethnicity audit found South Asian and Chinese clients under-represented relative to the local population, a documented equity gap the centre has tracked across repeated audits (2001, 2003 and 2019).
In 2024 the centre relocated to a new purpose-built facility, the Peter Mount Building, reflecting continued institutional investment nearly four decades after it first opened.

Read the full analysis: https://mft.nhs.uk/saint-marys/services/sexual-assault-referral-centre-sarc/