Rathnayake, J.C.; Mat Pozian, N.; Carroll, J.-A.; King, J. Barriers Faced by Australian and New Zealand Women When Sharing Experiences of Family Violence with Primary Healthcare Providers: A Scoping Review. Healthcare2023, 11, 2486.
Rathnayake, J.C.; Mat Pozian, N.; Carroll, J.-A.; King, J. Barriers Faced by Australian and New Zealand Women When Sharing Experiences of Family Violence with Primary Healthcare Providers: A Scoping Review. Healthcare 2023, 11, 2486.
Rathnayake, J.C.; Mat Pozian, N.; Carroll, J.-A.; King, J. Barriers Faced by Australian and New Zealand Women When Sharing Experiences of Family Violence with Primary Healthcare Providers: A Scoping Review. Healthcare2023, 11, 2486.
Rathnayake, J.C.; Mat Pozian, N.; Carroll, J.-A.; King, J. Barriers Faced by Australian and New Zealand Women When Sharing Experiences of Family Violence with Primary Healthcare Providers: A Scoping Review. Healthcare 2023, 11, 2486.
Abstract
Despite the Australian Government’s attempts to reduce domestic violence (DV) incidences, impediments that exist within the social and health systems and interventions designed to identify DV victims may contribute to female victims’ reluctance to disclose DV experiences to their primary healthcare providers. This scoping review aimed to provide the state of evidence about reasons for such reluctance to reveal DV, symptoms and comorbidities patients present to healthcare providers, detection and interventions in the clinical setting, and recommendations to generate more effective responses to DV. Female victims are reluctant to reveal DV because they do not trust or believe that general practitioners can help them to solve the issue, they do not acknowledge they are in an abusive relationship or are unaware that they are, or had been, victims of DV. The most common symptoms and comorbidities victims present with are sleep difficulties and fear. DV screening programs are the most prominent intervention type within Australian primary health services. This scoping review provides formative evidence that further research and interventions are required to increase professional skills, knowledge, sensitivity and referral processes among primary healthcare professionals treating patients experiencing DV in Australia.
Keywords
domestic violence; primary healthcare; general practitioners; female victims; nurses and midwives
Subject
Public Health and Healthcare, Public Health and Health Services
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
