Ipas developing tool kit to evaluate health services for sexual violence survivors

An Ipas tool to evaluate the quality of health services for sexual violence survivors will have the potential to improve the care of women far and wide. Photo courtesy of Richard Lord.

Ipas is creating an evaluation tool kit to aid health programs that provide services to sexual assault survivors. The kit was developed in response to service managers’ needs for simple tools that measure the effectiveness and quality of care they provide to their clients.

In June, Ipas received a grant from the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI), a project of the Global Forum for Health Research and the Medical Research Council of South Africa. The grant funds the compilation and online publication of a comprehensive packet of evaluation tools and methods for sexual violence projects worldwide. The tool kit will be available in October on the Ipas and SVRI websites.

Ipas Senior Research Associate Debbie Billings is a member of SVRI’s coordinating group and spearheads the effort with colleagues from the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Public Health and the Research Triangle Institute, both of the United States.

Billings said: “Ipas has been working with funds from the Latin America and Caribbean Region of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) for the past year to create a tool kit of instruments and indicators for people who want to evaluate the quality of health services for rape survivors. The tools were tested in four Latin American countries and can be used by organizations to evaluate their services by interviewing health-care providers, women who have used the services, taking stock of inventory of supplies, and doing policy analysis. We feel like it will be a good package of materials that people can adapt to their settings.”

The SVRI grant will enable Ipas to build on the tool kit developed by its Latin America program and bring it to a broader global audience of service providers, managers, policymakers, researchers and activists. After gauging the strengths and weaknesses of their services, they can offer more comprehensive care, better reach their intended audiences and use their financial resources more cost-effectively.

During the first phase of the UNFPA project, Ipas and UNC researchers explored existing methods of defining and measuring quality care for sexual assault victims.

Billings continued: “Even though the UNPFA project was Latin America-focused, the literature search ended up being primarily focused on the United States and Canada because that’s where people are publishing in peer-reviewed journals. But we can’t base all our work in the United States.”

The literature search showed that there were few studies that evaluated the quality of health services for people who have experienced sexual violence; one factor is the relatively recent acknowledgment of sexual violence as an international public health problem and since that recognition has lagged, so too has emphasis on making sure that programs that try to prevent violence or treat survivors are actually effective.

Beyond the lack of geographic diversity in the literature review, there was also a stunning lack of information about including and evaluating reproductive health care services for survivors.

“It’s amazing to me,” said Billings, “that even in the United States, no one used access to safe abortion services as an indicator of quality of care. And very few included emergency contraception. We’re still at the level of helping the woman recuperate, dealing with her mental health or if she has bruises, cuts or burns, making sure that she gets care for those things. But the reproductive health care pieces are absent, at least in the measurement and evaluation of programs.”

With her involvement with the SVRI, Billings hopes to encourage researchers to pinpoint survivors’ reproductive health needs as a key area of study and to foster discussion about how sexual violence survivors must have access to the full spectrum of reproductive health services, including abortion. Many countries that severely restrict abortion permit it in cases of rape, but even so, women often face nearly insurmountable barriers to obtaining abortions allowed by law.

“Ipas is bringing abortion to the table. We’re the presence that constantly says that access to abortion is something that sexual assault survivors should have and that women everywhere should have. We are a voice that needs to be heard,” said Billings.

For more information, contact media@ipas.org