Teaching healthcare students to respond to family violence

This project explores the needs of a wide variety of healthcare students to respond to patients experiencing family violence. I collaboration with researchers form departments such as Paramedicine, Nursing and Midwifery, Biomedical Imaging, Social Work, Psychology, Medicine, Occupational Therapy, and Physiotherapy in order to define the right knowledge, attitudes and skills that students require and explore how this can be embedded into their curricula. This project has yielded a new guideline for paramedics to respond to patients experiencing partner violence, a new scale to measure the readiness of healthcare students to encounter partner abuse patients, book chapters, and publications supporting the introduction of this topic into the healthcare curricula. Future work on developing and integrating family violence training into the curricula of the various healthcare departments is needed. Additionally supporting research that examines the readiness of students to engage with patients experiencing family violence, and methods of fostering changes in attitudes are needed. Students could select one or more aspects of this work and would be supported to apply for grants and funding to engage in PhD or Honours programs, or other research programs.