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In the United States, 1 million women a year report being abused by an intimate partner, and half of them suffer physical injuries, according to a study by researcher and educator Judith McFarlane, RN.

Imagine changing — maybe even saving — a woman’s life by spending less than an hour on the phone.

Inspired by the belief that nurses can make a difference in the struggle to end family violence, researcher and educator Judith McFarlane, RN, DrPH, FAAN, set out to test a way nurses could help women break free of their abusers. McFarlane designed a clinical trial that looked at the effectiveness of nurses performing a telephone intervention to encourage safer behaviors among women with abusive partners.

The interventions took place in six nine-minute phone calls totaling only 54 minutes, and McFarlane believes the process can easily fit into any clinic or hospital setting with minimal costs.

In a study titled “Increasing the Safety-Promoting Behaviors of Abused Women” published in the March issue of the American Journal of Nursing, McFarlane details the success of the intervention: Abused women who received the phone calls were more likely to take steps to enhance their safety.

For health care providers, the study proves something else: Nurses can play a vital role in combating family violence.

“This is a nursing issue,” McFarlane said. “It’s not a medical issue. There is no prescription you can write to end domestic violence.”

Epidemic proportions

In the United States, McFarlane says in her study, 1 million women a year report being abused by an intimate partner, and half of them suffer physical injuries.

The National Violence Against Women Survey, conducted in 2000 by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Justice, concluded that intimate-partner violence is pervasive in the United States, with 25% of women contacted and 7.6% of men saying they’d been raped or physically assaulted in their lifetime by a date or an intimate.

Of the 4.8 million incidents of abuse against women, the survey estimated that 2 million resulted in an injury and more than 552,000 required medical treatment.

The abuse is an epidemic, McFarlane said, and not all cases are detected. She’d like to see screening for signs of domestic violence as a normal part of patient contact like taking someone’s blood pressure.

“No one deserves to be hit,” she said. “We can end this. I think nurses are in a pivotal position to end this.”

McFarlane’s study involved women who had sought a protective order against an abusive partner. Working through the family violence unit in the county district attorney’s office in Houston, the researchers — five nurses and one caseworker — found 154 eligible women. All but four agreed to participate in the study.

Those 150 women were divided equally into a control group and those targeted for the interventions. One woman died by suicide three weeks into the study, but the others all continued with the 18-month study.

Women in both study groups received the usual services from the DA’s office including discussion of safety-promoting behavior.