TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2018//
TI  - Medico-legal documentation of rape or sexual assault: are community-service doctors equipped for the task?
JO  - South African family practice
A1  - Fouche, Lamaine
A1  - Bezuidenhout, Johan
A1  - Liebenberg, Chantelle
A1  - Adefuye, Anthonio Oladele
SP  - 46
EP  - 46
VL  - 60
IS  - 1
N2  - 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<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 1726-426X
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20786190.2017.1348046
ID  - ref1
ER  -