Project Connect
Authorized by the Violence Against Women Act of 2005 and funded by the Office on Women’s Health with support from the Administration for Children and Families, Project Connect: A Coordinated Public Health Initiative to Prevent Violence against Women is a national initiative to change how adolescent health, reproductive health, and home visiting programs respond to sexual and domestic violence. Research demonstrates that women in these programs are at high risk for abuse, and that there are evidence-based interventions that can improve maternal and child health, and decrease the risks for unplanned pregnancy, poor pregnancy outcomes and further abuse. One of the only programs offering a national coordinated public health model to improve the health response to domestic and sexual violence, Project Connect’s multi-pronged approach includes creating and disseminating:
- Enhanced clinical interventions to respond to domestic and sexual violence, including training and supporting materials for providers and health systems;
- Patient education materials on the connection between abuse and their health;
- Policy and systems change at the local, state and national level;
- National training of providers through an eLearning platform;
- Pilot programs to offer basic health services within domestic and sexual violence programs; and
- Evaluation and research on the health impact of abuse and the impact of health-based interventions.
Project Connect is currently funding nine geographically and ethnically diverse communities across the nation: Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Texas, Virginia, and one Native American community in California, Kima:w Medical Center. These sites provide much-needed services for women in abusive relationships including historically medically underserved communities that have high rates of domestic and sexual violence, such as rural/frontier areas, immigrant women, and Native Americans.
As the national coordinator for Project Connect, Futures Without Violence provides technical assistance, tools and resources, training, and coordination for all sites. UC Davis School of Medicine is implementing an evaluation plan to measure the effectiveness of both the clinical intervention and policy change efforts.
In just one year, Project Connect has had a significant impact:
- With over 1,500 providers from 50 clinical sites receiving training, programs serving over 200,000 women will integrate assessment for abuse into routine care and offer help when needed, using an evidence-based and setting-specific clinical intervention.
- Using input from health providers, domestic and sexual violence advocates, community members and policymakers, new education materials for providers and patients/clients have been developed by Futures Without Violence, including:
- New clinical guidelines for reproductive health providers
- New training curriculum for home visitation programs
- New safety cards for adolescents talking about healthy relationships
- Twelve new video vignettes an electronic distance learning platform that will be used to train providers in adolescent, reproductive and maternal and child health programs nationwide.
- Already, these materials have had a national dissemination beyond Project Connect sites through the National Health Resource Center on Domestic Violence. For example, the reproductive health guidelines are now being offered to other state funded programs such as Family PACT in California, which serves over 1.3 million women statewide.
- Coordinated state level teams of public health and domestic and sexual violence partners have been formed to create lasting health policy and coordinated response to victims. Examples of policy change include adding assessment of domestic and sexual violence into statewide nursing guidelines, and improving data collection by adding new questions about domestic and sexual violence to statewide surveillance systems. Futures Without Violence also developed policy memos on the recently federally-funded home visitation and teen pregnancy/parenting programs, which are being used by sites to shape program planning in their states.
Futures Without Violence and the project sites will build on the work of the first year, as well as focus on new areas for the upcoming year:
- Implementing an e-learning platform to train tens of thousands of additional physicians, nurses, and students. Beginning in Spring 2011, the free online CME trainings will be offered to Project Connect sites, as well as national health associations, such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
- Offering basic health services on site in select domestic and sexual violence programs in each Project Connect site. Program strategies include: utilizing mobile health vans, stationing public health nurses in family violence programs, integrating basic health assessment questions into domestic violence shelter intake, and partnering with local providers for ongoing care.
- Creating sustainability for the work of Project Connect at the state, local, or tribal level. Futures Without Violence is providing guidance for sites to develop policy agendas and action plans to identify opportunities for program and policy changes that will support their work.
- Evaluating the impact of Project Connect’s clinical intervention on the health and safety of victims of abuse. In addition to the initiative-wide evaluation of provider behavior change, two states have partnered with local universities to conduct an in-depth evaluation of the effect that integrating the assessment of domestic and sexual violence into clinical settings has on clients.
- Disseminating information on best practice models for integration in other states/tribes and service settings. Plans include an educational briefing and development of a report outlining model programs.
Learn more about Project Connect and the sites selected by reading the Press Release.
For more information about Project Connect, contact:
Virginia Duplessis, MSW
vduplessis@futureswithoutviolence.org
