WHO's Fight Against Gender Violence

Poland seeks to improve the health sector's response to the needs of women, men, boys, and girls who experience violence due to the Ukraine crisis. WHO highlighted the need for safe, dignified violence response services as a public health issue and supported the efforts to strengthen the health system response to the clinical management of rape and build the capacity of health partners to provide first-line support to violence survivors.

Against this backdrop, the WHO Poland country office organized a Clinical training of trainers (ToT) from 22 to 24th November 2023 in Warsaw, Poland. The TOT was meant to foster understanding of and develop the skills of participants and build a network of health professionals within the health system who are champions of addressing and promoting women-centred care for survivors of gender-based violence, in addition to strengthening their knowledge and skills to provide national or sub-national training and technical support on the health system response on VAW, drawing on WHO tools, resources and guidance documents with the overreaching goal of developing a follow-up plan to strengthen countries’ health system capacity to respond to violence against women.
The participants included academics, government commissions, doctors, clinicians and clinical heads of International non-governmental organizations (INGOs). They will play a key role in implementing clinical training at the facility level in 2024, working closely with health manager cohorts of trainers to ensure the maximum institutionalization and sustainability of the training. The training programme is based on the WHO Caring for women subjected to violence: a WHO curriculum for training health-care providers, revised edition, 2021.

Moving forward, within the next 12 months, the cohort will cascade the training to the health workforce involved in responding to intimate partner violence and sexual violence against women to expand the course outreach in the country towards ensuring survivor-centred care.