Resources addressing intimate partner violence (IPV) play a role in shaping how
physicians conceptualize and perform their roles in caring for affected
patients. This study combines environmental scanning with critical discourse
analysis (CDA) to parse how roles of physicians were represented in 28 education
materials and policy documents about IPV, taking the Canadian training milieu as
an example. We developed a cyclical model of three core physician roles in
addressing IPV—learning about IPV, identifying patients experiencing IPV, and
responding to patients’ disclosures of IPV. The construction of these physician
roles is suggestive of an ongoing process of medicalization of IPV.