Increased awareness of intimate partner abuse after training: a randomised controlled trial

Intimate partner abuse is very common among female patients in family practice. In general, doctors overlook the possibility of partner abuse. To investigate whether awareness of intimate partner abuse, as well as active questioning, increase after attending focus group and training, or focus group only. Randomised controlled trial in a stratified sample. Family practices in Rotterdam and surrounding areas. A full-training group (n = 23), a group attending focus group discussions alone (n = 14), and a control group (n = 17) were formed. Data were collected with incident reporting of every female patient (aged >18 years) that was suspected of, or presented, partner abuse during a period of 6 months. The primary outcome measure was the number of reported patients; the secondary outcome measure was the number of patients with whom the GP had non-obvious reasons to suspect/discuss abuse. Comparison of the full-training group (n = 87 patients) versus the control group (n = 14 patients) resulted in a rate ratio of 4.54 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 2.55 to 8.09, P