DREAMS
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Detecting and Responding effectively to domestic abuse in mental health settings: Improving service provision for domestic abuse victims
IRAS ID
333083
Contact name
Kate Walker
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
NHFT
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
DREAMS, DREAMS
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 8 months, 0 days
Research summary
Background: Last year, over 2 million people in England and Wales experienced domestic abuse and responding to this abuse costs health services £2.3 billion each year. Experiencing domestic abuse has devastating physical and psychological impacts for survivors. Survivors are frequent users of mental healthcare services; however, their victimisation often remains hidden because they struggle to tell others about their abuse. Mental healthcare professionals rarely receive training on asking patients about domestic abuse or know how to help survivors when they tell them about their victimisation.
Aim: We will develop a new process for professionals to ask patients if they are experiencing domestic abuse, to help professionals identify survivors and enable them to provide signposting/onward referral to the right support services.
Design/Methods: Firstly, we will give 166 mental healthcare professionals who work in Northamptonshire and Leicestershire NHS trusts a questionnaire about their knowledge/attitudes, how able they are to identify and respond to domestic abuse, what (if anything) they currently do to uncover victimisation and help patients access further support. We will recruit different professionals from different mental health services, working with diverse groups of patients, some of whom might experience health inequalities, so we understand specific issues that affect these groups.
Secondly, interviews with 20 professionals and 20 patients/survivors will increase our understanding of current practice and what helps or hinders in identifying domestic abuse and supporting survivors. We will explore gaps in current provision within existing mental health services.
Finally, working with 20 professionals and 10 patients/survivors, we will combine our findings to develop this new way of identifying and responding to domestic abuse for professionals to use in mental health services. We will test how effective this is in a future research project.
The project will take 20 months to complete and has been funded by NIHR RfPB scheme.
REC name
West Midlands - Coventry & Warwickshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
23/WM/0233
Date of REC Opinion
14 Nov 2023
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion