Today’s “Learning from Loss” report (available here) and The Guardian’s coverage of Dame Nicole Jacobs, the independent Domestic Abuse Commissioner, paint a devastating but all-too-familiar picture. In her call for urgent action, Nicole Jacobs warns that the government is failing to learn from the deaths of women killed by partners and ex-partners, ignoring the very systems that could have prevented them. The report confirms what we at IRISi Interventions have been saying for years: healthcare is one of the most powerful, yet underused, settings to prevent harm and death caused by domestic abuse. And still, no one is listening.
We are deeply grateful to the Domestic Abuse Commissioner and her team for reinforcing how essential healthcare professionals are in tackling gender-based violence. We know this role intimately. It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve always done.
Yes, we do need to learn from loss. But we also need to make sure we’re learning from experience – and investing in cost-effective, evidence-based solutions that support healthcare’s response to domestic abuse.
Our experience scaling up the IRIS and ADViSE programmes has shown us the following:
- Each trained healthcare professional can identify and refer at least one survivor of domestic abuse to safety and support. Some identify many more. Imagine if that were scaled across every general practice and sexual health clinic in the country.
- In 2023–24 alone, IRIS-trained general practice staff supported an estimated 15,800 victim-survivors of domestic abuse.
- Over 4,600 healthcare professionals were trained in that same period through IRIS and ADViSE. The majority of patients referred through these programmes had never accessed specialist support before.
This is not theory. It’s practice. And it saves lives.
Our IRISi 2023–24 network national report (available here) sets out the same urgent priorities echoed in “Learning from Loss” and “Never Again. Again”, the recent report from Standing Together Against Domestic Abuse: the need to invest in healthcare-based domestic abuse interventions, ensure proper training and secure sustainable funding. Yet despite clear and consistent evidence, this work is becoming increasingly difficult to continue, held back by the very barriers these reports expose: lack of coordination, inadequate resourcing, and repeated missed opportunities to act.
We see our data quoted in so many reports. We see our models referenced. But we’re not commissioned sustainably. And we’re not being heard. This is not just about learning from what has already been lost to domestic abuse. It is about acting on what we already know.
We urge the Labour Party (UK), NHS England, the Department of Health and Social Care, Integrated Care Boards, and policymakers across the UK to take this moment seriously. Embed the learning. Fund the solutions. Listen to the experience.
The Commissioner’s urgent call to connect the upcoming VAWG strategy with NHS policy echoes what we said just last week. As Nicole Jacobs put it:
“When the VAWG strategy is published later this year it must link more closely to the NHS plan to make sure the NHS plays its part in keeping victims and survivors safe.”
The healthcare system has the reach. We have the evidence. Survivors deserve the action.
