Establishing a VIP Programme

Part Three: How do you know if the intervention is helpful?

In this section:

Evidence for the intervention
What outcomes can you expect from introducing a family violence intervention programme? How do you know you are making a difference?

Customer satisfaction rates will increase, and victims will give positive feedback about the health professional offering family violence intervention

Rates of routine questioning and victim identification will rise across services.

Rates of referrals from health services to community agencies will increase.

The DHB’s score on the Ministry of Health Audit of DHB responsiveness to family violence will improve.

Longer-term outcomes may include:

decreased utilisation of health services
reduced long-term rates of family violence
children growing up in safer families
breaking the cycle of violence.

How can the quality of family violence intervention be measured and maintained?
To ensure the quality and safety of the intervention supervision/peer support should be provided for heath professionals when they first begin family violence intervention (after a disclosure of abuse). This allows staff to:

assess their standard of practice during self-reflective learning
receive the necessary emotional and professional support regarding practice.

Pre- and post-teaching evaluations can assess how much staff understand about family violence intervention before and after the training session. This helps the training co-ordinator assess where additional support is necessary to ensure quality intervention is offered. See Training Evaluation

Audits should be conducted regularly to assess:

the staff’s knowledge and understanding of family violence intervention policies
abuse screening rates and standards of documentation.

Staff should be interviewed regularly to assess the barriers that need to be addressed and possible avenues for family violence interventions within their practice.

Quarterly feedback from the community agencies who receive referrals from the DHB is an effective way of monitoring that the quality and quantity of referrals has increased since a family violence intervention programme’s inception.

Evaluation and Audit
Evaluation and monitoring are pivotal aspects of the implementation of a programme, when the intention is to achieve and sustain change (Campbell et al 2001; Grimshaw et al 1999).

Evaluations should have practical value or be useful to the target audience to the audience, for example the coordinator of the family violence intervention programme and or steering group.

Evaluations and audit can be useful for many reasons including:

Evaluations can influence decision-making regarding programme implementation, for example indicating need for refresher training or increased resources.
Evaluations can provide updates on implementation progress in accordance with performance indicators that are supplied to senior management.
Evaluations provide an opportunity for stakeholders to feed into the change process. For example, asking staff about the barriers and enablers to screening and the strategies to address these issues or asking community agencies to report on the quality and quantity of referrals received.
Clinical audits and evaluation processes support change because staff appreciate feedback and hearing about how the family violence intervention programme is being implemented.
It is useful to involve staff in programme evaluation because they are well placed to provide feedback on how the new programme is impacting on clinical practice. They are also well placed to tell researcher about the barriers and enablers for screening that they are experiencing.
Evaluation also provides useful information to the staff and conveys a message of collaboration
Evaluation and audit offers a process that engages staff in the process and ensures a 360-degree feedback loop is in place.

Audit Templates
Terms of Reference for a clinical audit can provide a guideline for audit implementation.

A simple Audit tool can be used to record audit results.

Evaluation Reports
Auckland University of Technology Interdisciplinary Trauma Research Unit - Evaluation to assess DHB responsiveness to the family violence intervention (www.aut.ac.nz).

Page last updated: 1 August 2007

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