Pacts Project is a wonderful resource educating health care students and professionals about how to recognise and respond to family violence.

Dr Jan Coles was working as a GP when she got the idea. She had a patient, a young woman who couldn’t look at her eight-week-old baby. Her new son had smiled at her while she was breastfeeding and she couldn’t stop crying. The patient eventually revealed that she had been abused as a child, and seeing her son’s smile had just put her straight back in to being that little girl who was terrified.

Dr Coles was an experienced GP by that stage, but had barely had any training around sexual assault, and she didn’t know what to do or how to help this woman. It was clear to her that health professional training around family violence needed to be improved for the sake of both doctors and patients.

So Dr Coles and the team at Monash University created Pacts Project, an open access online teaching and learning course, with learning modules and training videos.

They’re hoping to expand in to workplaces and the wider community, so that anyone can be a good first respondent. To see if it could help you in the work that you do, jump on board at Pacts Project.

By guest blogger Alinta