2006 Media Releases
Tuesday, 11 July 2006
GP Guidelines Target Family Violence Globally
General practitioners will be globally recruited into the front line of defence against domestic violence with the development of new international guidelines to assist GPs manage patients threatened by violence between partners.
Developed by a highly-credentialled team of international specialists - led by La Trobe University Senior Research Fellow Dr Angela Taft, Associate Professor Kelsey Hegarty, from the Department of General Practice at the University of Melbourne, and Professor Gene Feder, of the Department of Primary Care Research and Development, Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry, London - the guidelines have been designed to help GPs and other health professionals manage the escalating social health issues resulting from family violence.
An Australian version of the guidelines was released in Melbourne last week by the Victorian Minister for Police and Emergency Services, Tim Holding, under the auspices of the Victorian Community Council on Crime and Violence in the State Department of Justice.
They were also presented to a national audience of GPs and primary health care researchers at the 2006 General Practice and Primary Health Care Research Conference in Perth on July 6, by Dr Taft.
Endorsed for use Australia-wide by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the guidelines will also be adapted for use in Canada, the UK, the Netherlands and the United States, reflecting the collaborative research input of the 11 universities and research institutes involved in their development.
The culmination of two years’ international collaboration, the guidelines evolved from an initial focus group meeting of primary health care specialists at an international physicians’ conference in Amsterdam in 2004.
Identifying a global need for better strategies to deal with intimate partner abuse where it most frequently presents – in GPs’ clinics and surgeries – this group invited a diversely qualified group of international experts to undertake a consensual approach to finding and evaluating solutions.
The resulting study, adopting the criteria of the World Health Organisation’s 2002 definition of “intimate partner abuse” as a starting point, resulted in 32 new clinical guidelines to assist GPs manage patient care in families affected by violence.
Under the title 'Management of the Whole Family When Intimate Partner Violence is Present: Guidelines for General Practitioners' – the guidelines set out a coherent set of best practice processes to help doctors identify, manage and support individuals and families affected.
They aim to assist GPs in caring not only for the immediate victims of abuse, but also the perpetrators, the secondary victims, and the complex matrix in which abuse occurs - the whole family unit.
Backed by funding from the Victorian State Government’s Department of Justice and managed through La Trobe University’s Mother & Child Health Research, the project also produced a new training curriculum for GPs’ continuing education.
Both the curriculum and guidelines are being trialled among 30 general practitioners drawn from the north-western suburbs of Melbourne, to be used as a framework for designing and evaluating models of good practice.
Dr Taft said her international collaborators expected an international version of the guidelines to be endorsed by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners’ counterpart organisations in their own countries, with some adaptations for local conditions.
For further information:
Dr Angela Taft - La Trobe Mother and Child Health Research Centre – Tel: 61 + 3 + 8341 8571 or 0413 486 213 Email: a.taft@latrobe.edu.au