Light for a Dark Corner : New study could help emergency rooms deal better with domestic violence

Domestic violence represents the dark corner of American family life. Ironically, a problem that logically requires counseling in a calm atmosphere too often is delegated to society’s front-line institutions of crisis management--the police department and the emergency room.

A high percentage of hospital emergency rooms in California responded in a study by the San Francisco-based Family Violence Prevention Fund. The new study’s findings suggest that many are not always as well prepared as they might be, or would like to be, to identify or properly refer the cases that come through their doors. Victims do not always tell the truth, and medical personnel may not have the necessary training to ask the right questions.

The study found that emergency rooms actually identified only 5% of the battered women who came in for treatment. Emergency room staffers may not always recognize immediately that injuries to women might have been caused by husbands or boyfriends. In fact, less than a quarter of the emergency rooms surveyed conducted training sessions on domestic violence. Few had written policies to handle cases.

Some administrators acknowledge that they are hindered by the fact that many victims do not want to say how they received their injuries. And our increasingly stressed-out society asks a great deal of emergency room personnel.

But even with everything else these overworked care-givers must deal with, it would help if more emergency rooms could arrange for some basic training in what questions to ask and on what to do next.

Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Orange County, for example, is adding some guidelines for victims of domestic violence to those it already has on child and elder abuse. Even a poster with numbers that battered women can call would help.

The study by the Family Violence Prevention Fund is just one, but if it contributes to increasing awareness in overworked emergency rooms it could lay the groundwork for helpful intervention and referral at a critical juncture.