Open AccessMedico-legal documentation of rape or sexual assault: are community-service doctors equipped for the task?
Author(s) -
L Fouché,
Johan Bezuidenhout,
C Liebenberg,
Anthonio Oladele Adefuye
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
south african family practice
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2078-6204
pISSN - 2078-6190
DOI - 10.4102/safp.v60i1.4680
Subject(s) - medicine , documentation , internship , service (business) , medical education , curriculum , sexual assault , likert scale , family medicine , suicide prevention , poison control , psychology , medical emergency , pedagogy , developmental psychology , economy , computer science , economics , programming language
Background: Following upon two-year internship, community-service doctors make mistakes when they deal with evidence of medico-legal examinations in various settings. These mistakes result in alleged perpetrators being released by courts. This study investigated undergraduate clinical forensic medicine training, based on experiences and opinions of community-service doctors. This article focuses on incidents of alleged rape cases only.
Methods: The study was a quantitative retrospective cohort study that made use of a questionnaire with an adapted Likert scale. An electronic survey tool was employed to target 150 community-service doctors throughout South Africa. Percentages are used to display results.
Results: A response rate of 59.3% was achieved. Although 80% of the participants reported that they had undergraduate training on how to manage alleged rape or sexual assault cases, only 11.4% of the participants had hands-on exposure to an alleged rape case during their undergraduate training. In addition, the majority of the participants (77.1%) never had undergraduate training on how to complete the J88 form. These findings indicate that clinical forensic training in the undergraduate medical programme does not adequately prepare community-service doctors to meet the challenges of clinical forensic practice. The current curriculum should be adapted to address these shortcomings.
Conclusions: Perpetrators cannot be convicted if evidence collected cannot stand up in court. Proper training of undergraduate medical students prior to their community-service posting will ensure that medico-legal documentation is completed correctly, leading to the presentation of credible evidence in a court of law in order to ensure successful conviction of alleged perpetrators.
Full text of the research articles are available online at www.medpharm.tandfonline.com/ojfp)
S Afr Fam Pract 2018; DOI: 10.1080/20786190.2017.1348046