Assessment Instruments Used To Study Healthcare-Based Interventions for Women Who Have Experienced Sexual Violence ->

Despite the limitations of this review, the findings suggest some important ideas concerning assessment instrument development in the study of healthcare based interventions for women survivors of sexual violence.  For example, only one assessment instrument focused on behaviour, namely, a screening instrument that was used to ask women about their experiences of violence.  Moreover, only one instrument examined attitudes. Provider attitudes toward rape survivors can affect the quality of services they offer and should be combined with healthcare delivery measures to assess more completely healthcare-based interventions.  Screening by healthcare providers to detect violence experiences among women to whom they provide care has been a topic of discussion among researchers and practitioners in recent years.  The IPPF multi-country project demonstrated the importance of behavioral assessment in providing care that met women’s multiple needs during their time in the clinics.  Further documentation that supports the utility and rigorousness of such instruments is needed. 

Although many of the assessment instruments examined the delivery of healthcare for sexual assault survivors, only one examined women’s perspectives in terms of how they felt about the care that they received.  Overall, gaps remain in terms of evaluating and assessing whether health services are meeting the full range of women’s needs during the immediate post-assault period.  These include examining the ways in which prevention and management of post-rape pregnancy is included in health service delivery, via provision of emergency contraception, abortion, prenatal and postnatal care, and adoption as viable options (which are sometimes limited in different legal contexts); how to deliver post-rape HIV and STI prophylactic treatment in ways that are accessible and agreeable to women; and how to offer supportive mental health services within hospital or clinic settings when few staff may have any training in psychology or other relevant fields.  The integration of patient assessments into evaluation efforts may be useful in developing and refining systems of care for survivors of sexual violence.

Another issue is that many of the assessment instruments were developed by the researchers or practitioners themselves, either for collection of clinical data or for use in a research study.  Although these assessments may be quite appropriate, there is often a lack of information concerning the validity, or even the reliability, of these tools.  In addition, instruments and methodologies need to be made more accessible to health care administrators and decision-makers so that ongoing evaluation can be incorporated into programming, the results of which can lead to service delivery improvements over time.

This review of assessment instruments concerning healthcare-based interventions for women who have experienced sexual violence found that there has been a variety of tools developed for studying this topic.  Researchers and practitioners are encouraged to continue this important work by collaborating to develop and refine a variety of assessment tools with sound psychometric properties that may be helpful in the description and evaluation of such interventions.

The SVRI would like to encourage the continued development of this compendium of assessment tools. Please assist us by forwarding relevant tools, links to svri@mrc.ac.za