Psychosocial Intervention With Community Worker Support for Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence

Female survivors of domestic violence (DV) may exhibit various mental health problems. A variety of psychotherapies are available to improve their mental health, however there is uncertainty on which is the best. In Colombian, national guidelines do not mention which therapy should be used and in practice, psychologists use their preferred approaches. Due to the shortage of psychotherapy appointments, patients wait a long time to initiate treatment and for each subsequent appointment. Furthermore, patients with mental health problems often fail to attend their appointments and often drop-out of their psychotherapy. This study will offer an alternative intervention that is hypothesized to be superior to normal patient care in Colombia. It will be conducted in Cali and Tuluá, which have high levels of DV, internally displaced conflict victims and large socioeconomic inequalities. Psychologists and trained Lay Psychosocial Community Workers (LPCWs) will work together to provide a cognitive-behavioral intervention (CBI) for female survivors of DV, which is a therapy that aims to change the way people think and behave. Each woman will be offered 11 weekly sessions which will be shared between a psychologist and a LPCW. The LPCW will assign tasks to the patients which have been set by the psychologist and will assist participants to attend their appointments. The study´s hypothesis is: 1) A psychologist led CBI with LPCW support is superior to standard psychotherapy care in Colombian health services to improve mental health symptoms of female survivors of DV. Patients will be recruited from health services and will be randomly assigned to either the standard psychotherapy or the CBI with LPCW support (intervention group). In the standard psychotherapy group, patients will receive psychotherapy approximately every four weeks, depending on demand, and will have as many sessions as they require. In the intervention group, patients will be offered eleven weekly CBI sessions. Mental health questionnaires will be used to measure the study participants\' mental health symptoms, their functionality, experience of DV and other forms of violence. In the intervention group, these questionnaires will be applied before initiating psychotherapy, two weeks and six months after completing their psychotherapy. Patients in the control group will have questionnaires applied before commencing psychotherapy and fourteen weeks and twenty-two weeks after starting.