Effectiveness of Training Program on Improving Health Care Providers’ Readiness for Managing Domestic Violence in Jimma Medical Center: Pre-Experimental Study

BACKGROUND: Domestic violence (DV) is a pervasive human-right violation and is an impediment to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Although they may not often disclose their violence, survivors of DV are most likely to be treated by health care providers. Thus, this study aimed to assess the effectiveness of training intervention in improving the readiness of health care providers for managing domestic violence in Jimma Medical Center. METHODS: Pre-experimental study design was undertaken among 64 health care providers of Jimma Medical Center on two rounds from March 16 to 19 and from May 18 to 21/2022. Data were collected by using a structured self-administered questionnaire and entered into Epi-data version 4.6 and exported to SPSS version 23 for analysis. To test the difference in the participants’ readiness to manage DV in terms of knowledge and attitude; a Paired-samples t-test analysis was done at 95%-confidence-interval and p-value <0.05. To quantify the magnitude of the intervention’s effect, Eta-squared was computed as an effect size statistic. RESULTS: The overall knowledge score was improved from pre-intervention (M= 12.44, SD=4.55) to post-intervention (M=15.66, SD= 5.48, t(4.29), p<0.0005). The overall attitude score was improved from pre-intervention (M= 156.4, SD= 15.68) to post-intervention (M=169.1, SD=20.67, t(3.8), p<0.0005). The Eta-squared value for the knowledge was 0.23 and for the attitude was 0.19 both indicating a large effect size. CONCLUSION: Significant improvement in the study participants’ readiness for managing DV was a result in this study with a large effect size. Thus, different concerned stakeholders should provide training intervention for health care providers of Jimma Medical center to improve their readiness to manage survivors of domestic violence thereby contributing to the reduction of the negative consequences that can be resulted from poor management of domestic violence.