Briefing reports from Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit's Responding Effectively to Violence and Abuse (REVA) project were launched on 14 October 2015 and can be downloaded via the links below:
- REVA - violence, abuse and mental health in England
- REVA - guidance for trust managers
- REVA - breifing for mental health professionals
- REVA - a briefing for commissioners
- REVA - briefing for service providers and commissioners
This REVA study, conducted collaboratively with colleagues from NatCen Social Research, Inequality Agenda and DMSS Consulting, looks at how the long-term effects of violence and abuse on victim-survivors are responded to within the National Health Service (NHS) and specialist voluntary sector support services. The research combines three strands of work:
- Analysis of the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey.
- A follow-up study regarding the implementation of Routine Enquiry (RE) about violence and abuse within several NHS Trusts.
- Developing outcome measures for voluntary and statutory sector services working with victim-survivors of violence and abuse.
The objectives of the project are to:
- Identify the prevalence of different types of child and adult abuse and violence and how these cluster together; understand the associations between past abuse and current health, mental health, service use and other factors; and explore the predictors of revictimisation and resilience.
- Identify what works in implementing routine exploration of violence and abuse in mental health assessments; how this gets embedded in practice and the impact it has on the experiences of service users.
- Ascertain how experience of trauma impacts on the use of health and support services across the life course of victim-survivors and what makes mental health and other services helpful/unhelpful.
- Develop an outcomes tool relevant to services working with victim-survivors in both voluntary sector and NHS settings, which is grounded in user and practice expertise as well as research evidence.
The project has established a Reference Group comprising relevant stakeholders, who provide regular feedback on emerging elements of the study and have had several meetings over the course of the project.