April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and a great time to explore a new online course that will help you support survivors of violence.
For the last five years, the Community Collaborative on Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) has been hard at work to clarify and address the learning needs of the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), the local Veteran's Affairs Office, and the University of Maryland Medical Center regarding IPV experienced by our students, employees, and patients. Collectively, we have been teaching, offering services, training, and doing research on this critical topic.
The collaborative is announcing a major accomplishment and resource offering.
Grounded in our learnings over the past few years, the collaborative partnered with faculty at the University of Michigan to develop an interprofessional Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to help train our campus community and beyond. The course, Intimate Partner Violence (IPV): Inter-Professional Strategies for Prevention and Response, is available at https://www.edx.org/course/intimate-partner-violence-ipv.
This self-paced course can be taken for free or continuing education, resulting in a sharable certificate. Course activities are designed to help learners think critically and implement theory-driven practices for identification, screening, and response to IPV across multiple levels of intervention (for example, individual, family, and community) and within the clinical settings of social work, law, nursing, dentistry, and medicine.
"This course is an invaluable resource for professionals in any setting who are working with, or will come into contact with, individuals impacted by intimate partner violence," says Laurie Graham, PhD, MSW, assistant professor, University of Maryland School of Social Work. "I interfaced with professionals from many different disciplines as a social worker supporting survivors of intimate partner violence and their families as they tried to access health care, legal, and social services. I wish a course like this had existed for me as I navigated these interactions and attempted to create a comprehensive system of care for people who have experienced or used violence in intimate relationships in my local community."