Family violence is a health issue. Canberra Health Services (CHS) delivers a range of inpatient and community health services for people across Canberra and surrounding Southern NSW region. CHS has broadened the scope of the Strengthening Hospital Responses to Family Violence (SHRFV-Vic) approach originally developed in Victoria to a whole of Health service response. The evidence-based SHRFV-Vic model is designed to address barriers to identifying and responding to family violence in a health context through effective training and system-level changes (Kearney & Gleeson, 2015).
Strengthening Health Responses to Family Violence (SHRFV) embodies a whole of organisation cultural change process aimed at sustained attitudinal and behavioural change relating to the drivers and responses to family violence. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, family violence has remained a priority for CHS with continued Executive endorsement and support for SHRFV as essential education across the workforce (in comparison to an ‘opt-in’ approach of SHRFV-Vic). The SHRFV team were agile in adapting communication strategies and training packages to embed the new policy and procedures underpinning the program despite competing organisational demands exacerbated by the pandemic.
SHRFV has built capacity and strengthened the capability of the workforce to respond to family violence, including the creation of a family violence clinician workforce (a component not in the original SHRFV-Vic model) to provide a specialist internal referral pathway. With a focus on safe and consistent practice, clinical documentation tools have been implemented, providing for the first-time an insight into family violence presentations and responses at CHS.
We will share the achievements and learnings from implementing SHRFV during a pandemic and how the Sensitive Practice model (facilitating feelings of safety, choice, and control) in a health service can create a safe environment where anyone, at any time, can seek support to lessen the impact of family violence.