"The questions made me realize how many times I could have been saved and removed from that situation": The experiences of patients attended to by paramedics for intimate partner violence, and actionable implementations for paramedicine
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Merritt, Nicole
Stranges, Tori N
Bartlett, Stephen
Sawyer, Simon
van Donkelaar, Paul
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INTRODUCTION: Intimate partner violence (IPV) persists as a severe and prevalent criminal, social, and health issue, most commonly affecting women. Survivors of IPV frequently engage with the healthcare system to access treatment, support, and resources. Paramedics commonly encounter, either knowingly or unknowingly, patients experiencing IPV. There is little empirical research on how paramedics manage cases involving IPV. OBJECTIVE: To examine how the perspectives and experiences of survivors of IPV who have been attended to by paramedics can inform our understanding of paramedic services. METHODS: Using an interpretive description qualitative approach in the context of paramedicine, self-identified women (18+ years) who reported a history of IPV and being attended to by paramedics for IPV-caused reasons participated in semi-structured interviews. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and de-identified. De-identified transcripts were inductively analyzed (NVivo) for common patterns. RESULTS: N = 9 survivors participated in interviews. Participants experienced cyclic and escalating physical, sexual, psychological, and coercive control forms of IPV. Participants primarily reported accessing paramedic services following instances of severe IPV and reported receiving minimal treatment and support. Challenges included bias and discrimination, poor individual paramedic conduct, undereducated and undertrained paramedics, insufficient infrastructure, inadequate transitions into healthcare and community services, perpetrator dynamics, and survivor dynamics. Corresponding solutions were safe and equitable paramedic behaviour, respectful conduct, mandatory education and training, develop functional infrastructure, develop functional transitions, and utilize techniques to engage with perpetrators and survivors. CONCLUSION: Personal, situational, practitioner, paramedic service, and broad systemic infrastructure challenges cause survivors of IPV to be underserviced by paramedic services. Inadequate intervention efforts may be harmful or fatal for survivors. Survivor-derived solutions may guide paramedic service improvements. With improved service delivery, paramedics could evolve into reliable and useful resources for survivors of IPV.
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BMC Women's Health
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25
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© The Author(s) 2025. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Marshall, RA; Merritt, N; Stranges, TN; Bartlett, S; Sawyer, S; van Donkelaar, P, "The questions made me realize how many times I could have been saved and removed from that situation": The experiences of patients attended to by paramedics for intimate partner violence, and actionable implementations for paramedicine, BMC Women's Health, 2025, 25, pp. 254