IRCT members across Asia attend Data in the Fight Against Impunity (DFI) seminar in Nepal

Three years since the Data in the Fight Against Impunity (DFI) Project was launched, the IRCT and member centre Transcultural Psychosocial Organization Nepal (TPO) are hosting a three-day DFI workshop in Kathmandu, Nepal on the dated April, 26-28, 2017 for IRCT members in Asia.

IRCT President Jorge Aroche opened the workshop on Wednesday together with TPO Executive Manager Suraj Koirala and IRCT Secretary-General Victor Madrigal-Borloz.

The workshop’s focus is on training participants in using the DFI database and to generate ideas for its improvements to make it relevant from the local clinical level to globally as a tool to share data about torture, its prevention, to ensure appropriate rehabilitation services to survivors and to evidence clinical practice. The DFI database is a clinical record keeping system, which translates the personal stories of clients into comparable data sets.

Other focus areas of the workshop aim to build capacity on data security and to discuss how to manage this sensitive information to ensure it is useful in day-to-day practices at the centre level and also improve evidence for the global fight against impunity.

The participants attending the Asian meeting come from Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea and Sri Lanka. They include centres that have been part of the DFI Project since the beginning as well as other IRCT centres that are interested in adopting the DFI database.

“It is great to be able to take part in this DFI seminar and hear how member centres have collaborated to introduce a clinical database that works across multiple contexts and delivers real impact. I am confident that we will gain greater insight and knowledge through discussions at this workshop over these three days in Kathmandu,” says Jorge Aroche, President of the IRCT.

“TPO Nepal was part of the initial group that developed the database with other torture rehabilitation centres from 11 other countries trying to respond to the needs of torture survivors and at the same time ensuring that our voice was heard as part of the IRCT collective. We are proud to host IRCT members from across the region here in Nepal to work together to hold our governments to account in the fight against impunity,” says Suraj Koirala,TPO Executive Manager

“It has been incredible to see how ideas generated during the inception meeting for this project from members have resulted in what is now an excellent clinical database created by centres for centres from the ground up,”concluded Victor Madrigal, Secretary-General of the IRCT.

The DFI meeting in Asia is the second of six regional DFI meetings to take place this year. The first meeting in the Sub Saharan region, was carried out in Nairobi between 5 and 8 April, while the next meeting will be held in Amman, Jordan from 3 to 6 May.

For more information

Central to the development of the sector’s ability to evidence its work, is the collection of appropriate, consistent and comparable clinical information. The DFI Project represents a system-wide response to this need. DFI is based on building expertise through partners and ensuring that it is shared. The IRCT member centres piloting the project were selected on the basis of regional balance and capacity to represent the full range of rehabilitation practices across the movement and their ability to provide leadership and sustainability in the development of the project into a longstanding program of work. Over the course of three years, ending in 2017, it will have put in place a standardized clinical record-keeping system in 33 member centres in 28 countries. In the final phase of the project, energy will be focused on sharing the database and associated training with the global movement to maximize impact.