| Summary: | Violence against women in intimate relationships has been recognised as a serious public
health concern. Formal health-care responses to this issue have been implemented across
the industrialised world. Few evaluations of these responses explore their impacts on
women's health or lives, and the perspectives of abused women on different health-care
responses are rarely reported in the academic literature. The purpose of this qualitative
study was to describe the health-care experiences of abused women and to generate
substantive theory on the essential components of an effective health-care response to
violence against women. This study generated an emergent grounded theory based on indepth
individual and group interviews with women who experienced abuse in their
intimate relationships (n = 16). The findings of this study suggest that women actively
strive to recover the health that they have lost through experiencing abuse in their
relationships. If abused women's strategies to regain health are supported by health-care
providers, this process is facilitated. Specifically, the women in this study identified
three significant components of such enabling health-care experiences: caring, sharing
control, and connecting. Conversely, if these strategies are not supported, aspects of
abusive relationship experiences may inadvertently be reproduced in health-care
experiences, leading to a further loss of health. Thus, changes in the structures of the
health-care system could either facilitate of impede improvements in the responses of
individual health-care providers and institutions to women experiencing violence.
Theory emerging from this study can be used to inform the development of models in
health care to address violence against women, as well as to evaluate the impact of
existing programs. === Medicine, Faculty of === Population and Public Health (SPPH), School of === Graduate
|
|---|
