One stop crisis centres: A policy analysis of the Malaysian response to intimate partner violence

BACKGROUND: This article aims to investigate the processes, actors and other influencing factors behind the development and the national scale-up of the One Stop Crisis Centre (OSCC) policy and the subsequent health model for violence-response.

METHODS: Methods used included policy analysis of legal, policy and regulatory framework documents, and in-depth interviews with key informants from governmental and non-governmental organisations in two States of Malaysia.

RESULTS: The findings show that women's NGOs and health professionals were instrumental in the formulation and scaling-up of the OSCC policy. However, the subsequent breakdown of the NGO-health coalition negatively impacted on the long-term implementation of the policy, which lacked financial resources and clear policy guidance from the Ministry of Health.

CONCLUSION: The findings confirm that a clearly-defined partnership between NGOs and health staff can be very powerful for influencing the legal and policy environment in which health care services for intimate partner violence are developed. It is critical to gain high level support from the Ministry of Health in order to institutionalise the violence-response across the entire health care system. Without clear operational details and resources policy implementation cannot be fully ensured and taken to scale.