Intimate partner violence in prehospital care: a narrative review of how often crews recognise, record and refer it

Description

Intimate partner violence is common and largely invisible to the health system, because the people living with it rarely arrive saying so. Ambulance crews are in an unusual position. They are often the only clinicians who see a patient at home, with the room, the household and the injury all in front of them at once, before anyone has had time to arrange the story. Several countries have asked crews to act on that, adding intimate partner violence to prehospital training, to assessment forms and to referral pathways. Whether any of it changed what crews actually do is unclear. Studies have been published, but they count different things, some the cases recognised, some those written into the record, some the referrals made, and the figures cannot be compared as they stand. This project gathers them and works out how far apart those three numbers are. The reading starts from a list already built.

Student responsibilities

Read up on how intimate partner violence reaches ambulance crews and what services ask them to do about it. Help build and run the search, screen the studies, pull the numbers out of the ones that qualify, and write a section of the paper.