Attitude of Primary Health Care Physicians in Kuwait Towards Domestic Violence Against Women

Abstract

Introduction: Domestic violence against women is an important public health problem. The medical practitioner’s personal value system and beliefs about domestic violence can play an important role to deal with problem and provide support to battered women.
Objective: The current study was formulated to reveal attitude of physicians towards domestic violence against women and factors affecting this attitude.
Methods: To achieve such aims, a sample of 565 physicians were interviewed out of 899 physicians selected for this study with an overall response rate of 62.8%. The target population for this study was all physicians in the primary health care centers in Kuwait.
Results: The results of the current study revealed that physicians tended to have a relatively low positive overall attitude score towards violence against women (60.75 + 13.16%), with a mean percent score of 42.36 + 15.37% for relationship between partners domain, 75.73 + 21.80% for good reasons to hit wives domain, and 58.39 + 17.11% for management of domestic violence domain. Female physicians tended to have a higher positive attitude score than males (62.9 + 13.36% compared with 58.3 + 12.52%, P < 0.001) as well as for each attitude domain. Years spent at the current job negatively correlated with the total attitude score of physicians towards domestic violence against women.
Conclusion: There is a great need to improve attitude of physicians about domestic violence, especially against women through properly planned training programs so that a better medical care and support of battered women can be achieved.