Nurses' recognition of domestic violence and abuse.

Abstract

Most literature and discourse on domestic violence and abuse (DVA) focuses on women but there is a need to be cognisant of the broader population experiencing DVA and the wide-ranging impacts that can affect anybody whatever their identity or background. Mental Health nurses are in a good position to help people who experience DVA but they need to be able to recognise it first. This paper reports on a review which aims to address the question: How can mental health nurses recognise domestic violence and abuse (DVA)?. The databases CINAHL, Medline, PsychINFO and ASSIA were searched using key terms related to DVA and nursing and recognition. The term ‘nursing’ was used as the ‘mental health nursing’ search term found only two papers. Limits for the search were English language research only papers from 2002-2017. Fifteen papers were included in the review. Most of the located research focused on health care practitioners in multidisciplinary teams with nursing literature focused on adult health nurses rather than mental health nursing. The findings are presented in the categories: education, training and organisational support, and, screening, inquiry and the therapeutic relationship, with an additional category (given the original aim of the review) ‘mental health settings’. The experience of DVA has significant consequences for mental health yet we found only two research papers focused on mental health settings. We therefore discuss and extrapolate from reviewed literature the implications for practice in the context of mental health nursing.