Providing therapeutic services to women and children who have experienced intimate partner violence during the COVID-19 pandemic: Challenges and learnings

Background In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, many therapeutic services for children and their parents who had experienced intimate partner violence (IPV) were required to rapidly transition to telehealth. Objective The current study aims to explore parents' experiences of participating in a parent-child telehealth intervention during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also aimed at exploring clinicians' experiences of delivering the service, including key strengths and challenges. Participants and setting Participants were five mothers who took part in Berry Street's Restoring Childhood service during the COVID-19 pandemic in Melbourne, Australia, and 14 Restoring Childhood clinicians, delivering the service across metropolitan and regional sites. Methods Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted, and data were analysed using thematic analysis to determine key themes and sub-themes within the data. Results Parents identified several strengths and benefits of Restoring Childhood delivered via telehealth including improvements in parenting skills and confidence, parent-child relationships, and children's emotional-behavioural functioning. Both parents and clinicians noted the creativity utilised during the online approach, and the increased accessibly it offered for families. However, challenges to the telehealth approaches were also noted. Clinicians discussed important considerations for telehealth within this context including safety and confidentiality, technology challenges, and challenges working from home. Conclusions The current study highlights the promise of telehealth interventions for parents and children who have experienced IPV. It also poses several important considerations for the use of telehealth within this setting and emphasises the need for rigorous evaluations of telehealth services for children exposed to IPV.