Health care providers' missed opportunities for preventing femicide.

BACKGROUND: Homicide of women (femicide) by intimate partners is the most serious form of violence against women. The purpose of this analysis of a larger multisite study was to describe health care use in the year prior to murder of women by their intimate partner in order to identify opportunities for intervention to prevent femicide. METHODS: A sample of femicide cases was identified from police or medical examiner records. Participants (n = 311) were proxy informants (most often female family members) of victims of intimate partner femicide from 11 U.S. cities. Information about prior domestic abuse and use of health care and other helping agencies for victims and perpetrators was obtained during structured telephone interviews. RESULTS: Most victims had been abused by their partners (66%) and had used health care agencies for either injury or physical or mental health problems (41%). Among women who had been pregnant during the relationship, 23% were beaten by partners during pregnancy. Among perpetrators with fair or poor physical health, 53% had contact with physicians and 15% with fair or poor mental health had seen a doctor about their mental health problem. Among perpetrators with substance problems, 5.4% had used alcohol treatment programs and 5.7% had used drug treatment programs. CONCLUSIONS: Frequent contacts with helping agencies by victims and perpetrators represent opportunities for the prevention of femicide by health care providers.

The role of alcohol use in intimate partner femicide.

The purpose of this study was to examine alcohol use by victims and perpetrators as a risk factor for intimate partner violence and femicide. A case control design was used to describe alcohol use among Femicide/Attempted Femicide victims (n = 380), Abused Controls (n = 384) and Non-Abused Controls (n = 376), and their intimate partners. Telephone interviews of proxies (family members or friends) of femicide victims and actual survivors of attempted femicide were conducted in 10 cities. The purpose of the interviews was to gather information about relationship violence and alcohol use by femicide victims, attempted femicide survivors, and their perpetrators. Telephone interviews of controls, recruited from the same cities by random digit dialing, were also conducted. Perpetrator problem drinking was associated with an eight fold increase in partner abuse (e beta = 8.24, p < .0001) and a two fold increased risk of femicide/attempted femicide (e beta = 2.39, p = .001), controlling for demographic differences.

Mentoring for publication: faculty and student perspectives.

Mentoring can be used to teach the writing process and to encourage undergraduate minority nursing students to produce manuscripts for publication. Through a one-to-one mentoring relationship with a nursing faculty member, a student is made aware of the links between writing as a critical skill for learning and acquiring the skills for professional nursing. The mentoring relationship supports the student from developing an idea for publication to actively participating in preparing a manuscript.