CCSAS Resources

Violence against women, including intimate partner violence and sexual violence, sexual abuse of children and adolescents is a major global public health problem, a violation of human rights, and has many health consequences. Thus, it is an issue that demands a concerted response from health-care providers and health systems worldwide with a particular focus on ensuring the capacity of health-care providers to provide client centered, competent, confidential and compassionate care.

The newly developed CCSAS provider/survivor interaction training videos are developed according to WHO recommendations on health provider and health system’s responsibilities and best practices. The videos will serve as a supporting tool to the WHO training curriculum or any other GBV training for clinical first line providers and are developed by Norwegian Church Aid (NCA) and International Rescue Committee (IRC) in partnership. The videos are currently available in English and French, but will be replicated in Spanish and Arabic in the coming years.

The program is intended for both clinical care providers and non-clinical health facility staff. It is designed to be delivered in a group setting with facilitators guiding participants through the material and directing discussions and group participation as appropriate. It is divided into five sections:

1. What Every Clinic Worker Needs to Know
2. Responsibilities of Non-Medical Staff
3. Direct Patient Care
4. Preparing Your Clinic
5. Forensic Examination

The first two are intended for a general (non-clinician) audience. Section 3 and Section 5 are intended for clinical care providers and contain graphic images inappropriate for untrained personnel. Section 4: Preparing Your Clinic is intended to guide participants through the process of assessing the current situation and developing an action plan for the improvement of services for sexual assault survivors.

The 2012 CCSAS multi country evaluation showed that further training on psychosocial care approaches was needed for health workers to provide quality support to survivors during their medical exams. This new toolkit aims to respond to these specific gaps in the CCSAS multi-media training tool. The specific training topics included in this new toolkit have been developed to accompany and complement the original CCSAS multimedia training tool. The sections are meant to:

• Help health care providers develop the skills to confidently and competently respond to the psychosocial needs of sexual assault survivors when they seek treatment in a healthcare facility, and
• Enable providers to establish a relationship of trust with survivors. The set up of the toolkit allows facilitators to pick and choose topics to enhance their training on psychosocial care according to the specific needs of the training participants.

Please note that this toolkit is not a training module on comprehensive case management or complete psychosocial care. Instead, it reinforces the theme of survivor-centered care, which shows compassion for survivors while giving health care providers practical tools to understand, engage, assess, and refer survivors to relevant follow up care. A new module has been created with greater detail on how clinicians can provide survivor centered-care. We recommend trainers review the material as it will help answer some of participants’ questions. It also includes a section on self-care for providers dealing with the stress of working with survivors. This updated facilitators’ guide will refer to this new module where relevant throughout the training. However, the module is not part of the DVD.