Identifying Domestic Violence Victims—It’s Our Job

Abstract

I mportant information about domestic violence, sometimes referred to as domestic abuse, can be found in several articles in this issue of JEN, along with two articles in the previous issue. These articles address the issue of domestic violence from a number of perspectives. Although the term currently favored is “intimate partner violence” (IPV), I prefer to use the older term domestic violence here, because I would like to think more broadly about the violence that occurs in homes and families, not only in the “intimate partner” relationship. Continued efforts by The Joint Commission and various health care organizations to encourage universal screening for domestic violence in the emergency department date back more than 2 decades. The American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, and other medical and nursing organizations all recommend universal screening for domestic violence. The ENA joint position statement developed with the International Association of Forensic Nurses states, “...nurses routinely screen patients for IPV.” Yet, as noted in the Triage Decisions column in the November 2014 issue of JEN, it has been shown that we emergency care providers are not identifying patients who have been the subjects of such violence in nearly the numbers that are consistently found in domestic violence studies. This is true even though victims of domestic violence are often frequent visitors to