Healthcare Clinical Champions in Family Violence: A Pilot Study - Abstract
Rationale, aims and objectives: Healthcare services play a vital role in identifying and responding to family violence. There is a growing expectation and requirement that hospital staff has an understanding of family violence and have the skills to identify and manage disclosure. While health services have historically implemented training programs to improve the clinical skillset, it is unclear how effective these training programs have been at improving the response to family violence.
This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a multi-faceted family violence training program on clinician self-reported knowledge, confidence and skills.
Method: Clinical staff including allied health, emergency department nursing and care co-ordinators underwent comprehensive family violence training. Training included aspects of a clinical champion’s model, Common Risk Assessment Framework Level 3 training, monthly clinical supervision, quarterly network meetings, additional training opportunities and secondary consultations as needed. Effectiveness was measured using a modified version of the Assisting Patient/Clients Experiencing Family Violence: Royal Melbourne Hospital Clinician Survey at pre-training, post-training and two further follow up time points
Results: Of the 45 clinicians who participated in the family safety training, 41 completed the evaluation survey at least once, with varying numbers of survey completion across the other 3 time-points. Statistically significant and sustained improvements were found in levels of self-reported family violence knowledge, confidence and frequency of screening.
Conclusion: In-depth, multi-faceted training can result in significant and sustained improvements in clinician self-rated knowledge and awareness of how to identify and respond to family violence. Change in clinical practice was further observed in clinicians’ self-reported screening for family violence. Findings from this study suggest that a multi-faceted approach to training hospital staff may increase translation of knowledge into clinical practice.