Hospital Staffs Learning to Spot Battering : Medicine: Program finds that with simple training, doctors and nurses get better at recognizing abuse and providing support to victims.

Efforts to educate emergency room staffs to recognize and assist battered women have paid off, sponsors of a pilot project at six California hospitals said Wednesday.

With a small amount of training and within a relatively short time, doctors, nurses and other emergency room staffers got better at recognizing the injuries, safeguarding evidence for possible prosecutions and providing support services to the victims, sponsors of the project said.

“The results are remarkable,” said Debbie Lee of the San Francisco-based Family Violence Prevention Fund, which undertook the project.

The organization chose County-USC Medical Center in Los Angeles and five other hospitals from San Francisco to La Jolla for the project.

When the study began in October, 1994, more than one-third of 500 emergency room staffers surveyed reported that they either did not treat battered women or didn’t know how many they treated each month, which told the project sponsors that many doctors and nurses weren’t recognizing evidence of domestic violence. By the end of the study, only 7% gave a similar response.

Authors of the survey said 39% of the health workers at the beginning of the project were documenting women’s injuries in their medical reports. By this month, that figure had risen to 66%.

When the project began, 43% of emergency department workers said they were advising battered women about how to take steps to protect themselves. But within a year, that figure was up to 65%.

Bolstered by the experience at the six hospitals, sponsors said they now are beginning a two-year program to train 1,000 health care workers at primary care clinics throughout the state to better identify, document and refer victims of battering to local services.

Dr. Deirdre Anglin, an emergency room physician at County-USC, said the project took the hospital by storm.

“A year ago, none of our residents or staff would come up and say, ‘Oh, Dr. Anglin, we had a domestic violence case.’ Now every time I walk into the department, someone approaches me to tell me about this case or that case.”

Anglin said that as a result of the effort, a special screening program has been started at the medical center.

“Any female 13 and over--whether they come in for an injury or a sore throat--is asked if their partner has ever hit them, hurt them or threatened them,” she said. Once it is determined that a woman has been battered, the victims are referred to a social worker, given support and told about community resources that might be available to them, from shelters to hot lines.

The counseling and support was one of the biggest changes brought about as a result of the pilot project because it recognizes that women need much more than a simple repair job for their injuries.

“The most important thing is to let these women know that they are not alone, that what happened to them is illegal, and most importantly, that it is not their fault,” Anglin said. “We make sure they know there is help and that they know where to turn to get the help.”