This Domestic Violence Awareness Month, learn how the Passageway program can help patients and employees

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. During this month, and always, Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital can look to the Passageway program for advocacy for patients and employees, training and consultation for providers and anything else that can prove helpful.

Since 1997, the Passageway program has provided confidential support, safety and resources to patients and employees who are unsafe, controlled, threatened or hurt by current or former intimate partners.

Passageway is here to help. It provides free, confidential services, including but not limited to supportive counseling, risk assessment and safety planning, legal and medical advocacy, intensive case management and connections to resources. Passageway advocates will never tell someone what to do, but rather are available to expand options and access to information, and work in partnership with survivors to increase safety, whatever that might look like for someone. Survivors do not need to be ready to take any degree of action or leave a relationship to work with Passageway.

Gina Sartori, MAT, MSW, LCSW, coordinates Passageway services at BWFH. With the program since 2019, she comes with extensive experience in teaching, activism and domestic violence work and continues to love being part of the BWFH community. “The empowerment-based, racial and social justice-driven and trauma-informed approach Passageway centers its practice in is the way I always envisioned practicing social work,” she says.

Passageway’s work is rooted in an intersectional, social justice model. Intentional violence can impact all of us—our relationships, families, communities, co-workers and our patients. And we know that those effects are inequitable based on our identities and lived experiences. Because of racism, oppression and marginalization, Black and Latinx people, members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people with different abilities are differently and inequitably impacted. Sartori says, “We need to be ever mindful of our propensity to replicate power and control in the medical system and all of our systems as we work with survivors. We are here to walk with someone in their journey, however they find most supportive.”

Passageway also offers extensive training, consultation, protocol development and technical assistance to providers at BWFH in any ways that could be helpful. If you would like to consult on a specific matter, request training for your department and/or discuss further institutional responses to survivors, we would love to hear from you.

Contact the Passageway program:

Phone/Voicemail: 617-983-7854
Pager: 617-732-6660, Beeper #39342
Email: passageway@partners.org 
Website: www.brighamandwomensfaulkner.org/patients-and-families/passageway

Published 10/16/23