Workers in Primary Health Care and Partner Violence Against Women

Abstract

Background: Morbidity associated to partner violence against women (PVAW) justify these patients repeated visits to Health Services. Primary Care is the ideal place for detectión and first aid, due to its easy accesibility and continuated assistance. Nevertheless, numbers show important difficulties to achieve this goal. Our aimis to find out the level of knowledge, opinions, awareness about organizacional barriers and improvement proposals suggested by the workers of primary care. Method: Cross-sectional descriptive study using an anonymous and voluntary survey during the months of August and September 2010, targeted to all professionals who performtheir work in a Primary Care Area of Madrid.We made a descriptive analysis of variables and used chi2 to compare the answers. Results: Answer rate is 170 (21.4%). There are stereotypes regarding battered woman and perpetrador. 118 (70.7%) professionals believe that this is a major problem and 154 (91.7%) that usually goes unnoticed. 91 (55.2%) know their legal commitments. 73 (51.8%) think that there are organizational barriers, among them: the burden of care 50(29%), lack of specific training 40(23.5), lack of knowledge about the procedure to be followed 20(11.8%) and about the professional responsabilities 12 (7%). Conclusions: All profesional categoríes showed an average level of knowledge, except for social workers that was high. Primary Care workers think that PVAWis an important issue that usually goes unnoticed. Half of them know the legal commitments o detección. There are organizacional barriers and stereotypes.