Health Staff Responses to Domestic and Family Violence: The Case for Training to Build Confidence and Skills

Abstract

Domestic and family violence (DFV) is a serious, worldwide public health concern and the literature suggests that women who have experienced violence identify health care providers as the professionals they would most trust with disclosure of abuse. Social work is well positioned to respond to women presenting in hospitals after experiencing DFV and in advocating for systems and policy initiatives to support health staff in becoming adequately trained and supported to detect and respond appropriately. This paper reports on research that surveyed health staff in two hospitals in Queensland, Australia, to identify what DFV training they had received, whether this training increased their knowledge, skills and confidence to address DFV and what services they would access to support women presenting with DFV. The results showed that the respondents were an experienced staff group who had worked in the health sector for 10–20 years but despite having access to State-based training, the majority of them had not completed any in-house training and only 12% had received face-to-face training, and when they did undertake training, it was usually only a two-hour session. Seventy-five per cent of respondents would refer to their hospital-based social worker and 40% would make referrals to other support services, primarily social work.<br/ >Implications<br/ >Hospitals need to prioritise, commit to, and resource appropriate and regular training to better equip health staff to identify and respond to DFV.<br/ >Training needs to build the knowledge and skills of staff members to address their confidence to intervene and offer support.<br/ >Social work can provide an important role in advocating and developing training and procedures to sustain health staff members’ capacity to respond appropriately to DFV.