Lifetime intimate partner violence exposure, attitudes and comfort among Canadian health professions students

Background: Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a widespread public health problem and training of health professions students has become common. Understanding students ' prior knowledge, attitudes and personal exposure to IPV will aid educators in designing more effective curriculum. As interprofessional educational efforts proliferate, understanding differences across disciplines will be critical. Findings: Students in the schools of Medicine, Nursing and Rehabilitation at a university in Ontario attend an annual daylong interprofessional IPV training. To measure perceived role and comfort with IPV and prior personal exposure, we administered a brief Likert scale survey to a convenience sample of students over three years. 552 students completed the survey; the overall response rate was 73%. The majority (82%) agreed that it was their role to intervene in cases of IPV; however Rehabilitation students expressed lower overall comfort levels than did their peers in other schools (p <.0001). Gender, age and prior training on the subject were not significant predictors of comfort. Seven percent reported lifetime IPV and one-fifth had witnessed IPV, but these exposures did not predict comfort in adjusted logistic regression models