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Confronting Chronic Neglect: The Education and Training of Health Professionals on Family Violence
Health professionals are often the first to encounter victims of family violence, but little is being done to educate these professionals to deal effectively with this problem. Training is not consistently offered to those who care for family violence victims. When it is offered, it typically is of short duration, offered at only one point in the health education program, and frequently limited to only one type of violence. The problem of elder maltreatment is a particularly neglected area in training.
Confronting Chronic Neglect: The Education and Training of Health Professionals on Family Violence, a new report from the Institute of Medicine, recommends ways that the health care field can improve training opportunities and raise awareness about screening, diagnosing, and treating victims of abuse and neglect. It calls for systematic and rigorous evaluation of existing programs, as well as the development of innovative approaches. The report offers four major recommendations:
- The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services should create family violence centers not only to conduct research on how such violence impacts the health care system, but also to evaluate training and education programs for health professionals. The centers should be modeled after similar facilities in fields such as injury control research and geriatric education. To lay the foundation for the centers' role in coordinating research activities, the report suggests that the U.S. General Accounting Office analyze the level and adequacy of existing investments in family violence research and training.
- Educators and professional organizations for health care practitioners should address core competency areas for health professional curricula on family violence; effective teaching strategies; approaches to overcoming barriers to training; and approaches to helping health professionals integrate insights from training into their everyday practices.
- Health care delivery systems and training settings, particularly academic health care centers and federally qualified health clinics and community health centers, should assume greater responsibility for developing, testing, and evaluating innovative training models or programs.
- Federal agencies and other funders of education programs should create expectations and provide support and incentives for evaluating curricula on family violence for health professionals. Evaluations should explore training's impact on the practices of health professionals and on outcomes for family violence victims.
Health professional training alone cannot solve the complex problem of family violence. Everyone in society shares the responsibility of responding to victims and preventing violence. The report encourages society as a whole to pay greater attention to the tragedy of family violence.
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