Early Education on Intimate Partner Violence in Undergraduate Medical Training: A Narrative Review on Timing,...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) encompasses physical, emotional, and sexual abuse within intimate relationships and is commonly encountered in clinical practice, affecting individuals across all backgrounds. Globally, healthcare settings represent a critical point of contact for individuals who have experienced intimate partner violence. IPV is associated with adverse health outcomes including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use disorders, traumatic brain injury, and adverse pregnancy outcomes. Despite high prevalence and recommendations to routinely screen women of reproductive age, IPV screening rates remain inconsistent, highlighting the need to examine how IPV education is incorporated into medical training. This narrative review evaluates undergraduate medical education on IPV, focusing on timing, instructional methods, and impact of interventions on student preparedness. A search was conducted in PubMed and Embase for studies published between 2000 and 2025, from which eligible articles were selected for full-text review. Existing curricula use multimodal approaches, including didactic sessions, small-group discussions, and simulation-based training, but are often isolated, optional, and rarely reinforced longitudinally. While these approaches improve short-term knowledge and confidence, gaps remain in sustained preparedness and consistent screening practices. Current approaches to IPV education may overestimate preparedness by emphasizing self-reported, short-term confidence, while failing to evaluate whether skills are consistently applied in real-world clinical settings. Repeated exposure to trauma-informed IPV education during preclinical years may help normalize screening and strengthen recognition skills. Future strategies should prioritize longitudinal, community-based curricula that reinforce IPV screening and response across multiple stages of medical training to better prepare physicians for real-world patient care.