History of the National Advisory Council on Violence and Abuse

Founded in 1991, the AMA National Advisory Council on Violence and Abuse supports physicians in dealing with violence in America’s communities. The Council includes more than 35 state and specialty medical societies, advisory federal agencies, and national advocacy groups. The Council actively encourages physicians and other health care providers to learn more about all forms of violence and abuse and to support prevention and treatment. The Council meets twice a year to conduct business and sponsors a yearly CME session for Council members (PDF, 56KB).

The Council's mission is to identify, develop, and promote practices and policies that enhance the physician's capacity to recognize and identify the presentations and consequences of violence and abuse in all their forms; ensure that physicians are capable of providing appropriate responses when these issues are identified; educate the medical community to play an appropriate role in the prevention of violence and abuse; encourage other health care organizations to identify and work towards similar goals of violence prevention; and provide leadership, advocacy, support, and guidance to other related organizations that share our goals.

The Council's accomplishments over the past 15 years include a series of eight monographs on various issues of violence and abuse that were published in the mid nineties. Included in this series are a set of publications on matters related to sexual violence--Diagnostic and Treatment Guidelines on Child Sexual Abuse; Mental Health Effects of Family Violence; Domestic Violence; Child Physical Abuse and Neglect; and Strategies for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Assault. Several thousand of each monograph were distributed to physicians across the U.S. In addition, the Council helped sponsor a series of workshops in the mid nineties to improve the coordinated community response to family violence.

Over the past two years, the AMA House of Delegates has approved a series of resolutions calling on the Council to provide leadership for setting standards for medical student education on domestic violence, to review the scientific literature and make recommendations for how physicians should approach the clinical screening of family violence, and to identify a research agenda for the primary prevention of family violence.  As a result, the Council has developed a set of learning objectives for medical students on domestic violence, helped to review the recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force on screening for domestic violence and developed a recommendation that will be voted on by the AMA House of Delegates in June 2005 asking physicians to assess family violence as a routine part of the social history of all patients.