Addressing Interpersonal Violence within a Hospital Context

This project aims to sensitize and train health workers in Belgian hospitals in addressing, assisting and referring patients in interpersonal violence situations adequately.
To this purpose 3 pathways were set up. The first pathway is one of giving basic trainings of 3 hours to 18 hospitals in Belgium (10 Dutch speaking and 8 French speaking ones). These trainings comprised two parts.
The first part addressed from an interactive yet scientific approach what interpersonal violence is and how a health worker can detect it.
The second part provided the health workers with tools and guidelines on how to assist patients adequately. The second pathway consists of an advanced training course of 24 hours on different topics ranging from detecting signals and symptoms of different types of violence, communication skills on violence, adequate care of patients in violent situations, implementation of guidelines, tools and procedures from a holistic approach to victims and aggressors and developing hospital specific protocols. This advanced training was provided to 18 hospitals that participated in the basic training in 2009, during a previous project.
Finally, the third pathway provided those hospitals who participated in the advanced training also with assistance in and coaching of the development of their hospital specific protocols on child abuse and maltreatment, elderly abuse and maltreatment, intimate partner violence and sexual abuse. The project was warmly welcomed by the hospitals and positively evaluated by the Federal Agency, assuring a follow-up in 2012.