New Passageway Advocate provides confidential support to patients and employees

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. Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital is pleased to welcome Gina Sartori, MAT, MSW, LCSW, as our new Passageway Advocate.

Sartori has extensive experience in teaching, activism and domestic violence work and is thrilled to be joining 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.

According to Sartori, the COVID-19 pandemic has had significant effects on all of us, and those effects are inequitable based on our identities and lived experiences. “We know that survivors of intimate partner abuse have been profoundly impacted during this time—needing to stay in places that may not be safe for them, emotionally and/or physically, and that access to resources such as mental health services, housing, shelter and food insecurity programs, immigration assistance to name a few are even more difficult to access than ever. Because of racism, oppression and marginalization, Black and Latinx people, LGBTQIA+ folks and people with different abilities are disproportionally impacted. In so many ways, this pandemic has amplified the marginalization that has always systemically existed.”

She says now, more than ever, survivors of interpersonal violence need and deserve support. And the Passageway program 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 like Sartori 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,” says Sartori “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.”

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

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.

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