Please see Jose Segal

Please see Jose Segal

The Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence (VRCFV 2015) determined that sharing of information between agencies helps keep victim survivors safe and holds perpetrators to account. The VRCFV inspired amendments made to the Victoria Family Violence Protection Act (FVPA 2008) resulted in the Multiagency Risk Assessment Framework (MARAM). The FVPA legislated the Family Violence Information Sharing Scheme (FVISS) to enable the implementation of the MARAM. Eastern Health is a large metropolitan health service in Melbourne which had to create an environment where mental health clinicians were capable of sharing risk relevant information. A Family Violence Advisor Project was created to implement the information sharing guidelines. This work became a shared response with the hospital Information Integrity team. In this session we will present a victim survivor and a perpetrator in a de-identified fashion, both of whom presented to the mental health program with a background of severe mental health issues and related comorbidities, upon which the family violence was being perpetrated, to highlight the clinical challenges facing the teams and how these intersected with the legislative frameworks to outline how Eastern Health is attempting to manage the challenges of confidentiality whilst still sharing information in order to keep victim survivors safe and to hold perpetrators accountable. We sought to understand how clinicians share information, risk assess and safety plan within their own organisation and with community based agencies when both the victim survivor and the perpetrator are consumers of the same area mental health service? How we maintain privacy, share risk relevant information and avoid collusion? What the record storage considerations for victim survivors and perpetrators are? What needs to be considered for Freedom of Information (FOI), subpoena processes and for the My Health Record, where family violence information is a concern?

3 x Key Learnings:
1. Clinical teams are working with extremely complex intersectional risks related to both the victim survivor and the perpetrator and their children.
2. Clinical information and electronic data systems combine very poorly in this working environment.
3. Inevitably, as one information integrity “hole” is closed, our consumer group challenge us by presenting new problems that open another Pandora’s box for us to find a safe solution for.