Many workers dealing directly with issues surrounding family and domestic violence receive just hours of specific training on how to handle it, or no teaching at all, an inquiry has been told.
The deficits came to light during a parliamentary inquiry into links between domestic violence and suicide, held in Melbourne on Thursday.
Training for nurses was confined to online modules depending on their health service, and was also lacking for midwives, representatives for the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation told the MPs.
"They call them online essential modules, that you'll have to do, but it isn't ... a core component", speaker Alana Ginnivan said.
"It's touched on as part of the social determinants of health, but it's not adequately addressed."
Almost half of psychiatrists reported they received fewer than two hours of domestic violence training in their entire careers, Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists representative Karen Williams relayed.
"That last statistic ... is quite alarming," Labor MP Louise Miller-Frost said in response.
Training is voluntary and hard to squeeze into the schedules of overworked psychiatrists, Dr Williams told the inquiry.
"There has to be a change in culture and acknowledgement that family and domestic violence is actually our core business," she said.
Earlier speakers said kids without specialised support were also often left with no option but to tell teachers learning "on the job" about domestic abuse experiences.
"Even if that disclosure goes well, if that conversation goes well, we know that they then face a service system that is adult-centric, that does not see them", violence against women scholar Kate Fitz-Gibbon said.
Family violence content is absent from the syllabuses of education and most social work degrees, she told the MPs.
"You can easily graduate from an undergraduate degree in social work without having any specialist training in family violence", Professor Fitz-Gibbon said
"By virtue of the prevalence of victimisation, they will come across it."
Prolonging paid domestic and family violence leave to 20 days instead of 10, and giving workers time off for abuse at the hands of coworkers was floated by the midwives and nurses union.
That would be a hard pill to swallow for small businesses, Liberal MP Alex Hawke said.
"You've gone straight to let's go to a big expansion including for very small businesses," he said.
The changes were needed to eradicate stigma around taking the leave, which the union's federal secretary Annie Butler said was why so few workers had exercised it since it became available in 2022.
She added family violence is an enormous social problem that cannot be solved piecemeal with different rules depending on the size and shape of businesses.
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