last updated February 1, 2006

The Family Violence Prevention Fund’s National Health Resource Center on Domestic Violence has released A Domestic Violence Campus Organizing Guide for Health Professional Students and Faculty. The guide is a new resource to help students and faculty organize various aspects of domestic violence issues.  A goal of the guide is to help the health care community combat violence and assist victims.  The guide includes examples of successful student efforts to improve the health care system's response to domestic violence issues, as well as a Domestic Violence Assessment Guide and an extensive list of resources and referrals.

The Health Privacy Principles for Protecting Victims of Domestic Violence published by the Family Violence Prevention Fund in October 2000, provides useful guidance for designing health privacy regulations or rules. The first section of this report emphasizes the importance of documenting domestic violence in medical records and protecting victims from disclosures that could threaten their safety. In particular, it discusses the kind of access to health care information that should be provided to spouses, employers, law enforcement officials, insurers and the community. The second part of the report introduces patient autonomy, confidentiality, safety and health of victims as the guiding principles of health care privacy and discusses eleven individual strategies for furthering those principles, including removing identifying information, ensuring patient access to information, providing notice of use and disclosure, and implementing and enforcing security safeguards.

The Family Violence Prevention Fund's Summary of New Federal Medical Privacy Protections for Victims of Domestic Violence illustrates some of the ways in which these principles have been incorporated into the medical privacy regulations released in 2000.

The National Partnership for Women & Families testified before the U.S. Senate on a proposed health privacy regulation. Although the testimony is in narrative form, it discusses some of the ways in which privacy regulations affect domestic violence victims. The organization emphasized that inappropriate disclosure of personal information can endanger the safety of victims of domestic violence and praised the inclusion in the proposed rule of a provision allowing victims to specify that information not be sent to their homes. The organization criticized instances in which the health care facility was given discretion to disclose information without the victim's authorization, but praised the provision that required that victims be notified about such disclosures.