Identifying Victims of Human Trafficking in Central Pennsylvania: A Survey of Health-Care Professionals and Students

Caring for trafficked and unidentified patients in the EHR shadows: Shining a light by sharing the data

“…It is likely that those enduring modern-day slavery in our midst are going largely unnoticed. This lack of confidence in caring for trafficked patients found in our survey is consistent with findings from a similar survey recently reported [ 49 ]. Our survey findings suggest that policy and technical interventions to improve care for trafficked patients might have sufficient support for pilot testing (e.g., biometric tools for identification that could improve patient safety and continuity of care; See Table 4 , Items 28–29).…”

“…Our survey findings confirm that healthcare providers—physicians and nurses alike—generally lack the necessary ability, understanding, and preparedness to provide patient-centered care for patients who are trafficked persons but that these providers are nevertheless eager to learn. Similar findings have recently been reported [ 49 ]. While the number of providers who indicated that they have encountered a patient known or suspected to be a trafficked person is relatively low, the vast majority of physicians and registered nurses lack confidence in their ability to spot the warning signs or indicators that a patient is a trafficked person.…”

“…Moreover, while there appeared to be a concentration of HT patient encounters in the Pennsylvania capitol region, this finding likely reflects heightened awareness from anti-HT efforts in that area rather than increased incidence. For example, Sinha, Tashakor, and Pinto reported recently that those who have had some educational training to identify trafficked patients show increased levels of knowledge, comfort, and confidence in caring for trafficked patients [ 49 ].…”

Hospital Health Provider Experiences of Identifying and Treating Trafficked Persons

“…Health care providers are one of the few groups of professionals likely to interact with victims of trafficking and therefore hold a unique position in their identification, treatment, and referral (Gibbons & Stoklosa, 2016). Notwithstanding this unique, but limited opportunity to intervene in the cycle of exploitation internationally (Cary, Oram, Howard, Trevillion, & Byford, 2016;Cheshire Jr, 2017;Titchen, Loo, Berdan, Rysavy, Ng, & Sharif, 2015) and nationally (George, McNaughton, & Tsourtos, 2016) many trafficked persons go undiscovered or unrecognised when interacting with health systems. Several factors drive this, these include: the trafficked person's survival-driven priority to often work long hours to support themselves and their families; disconnection from or the absence of accessible mental health services (Lewis-O'Connor & Alpert, 2017); the cumulative physical and mental health impacts of repeated and sustained substance or sexual abuse (Alpert et al 2014;Domoney 2015;Patel, Ahn, & Burke, 2010); the trafficker's adept controlling of the trafficked person (Alpert, et al, 2014); profound patient fearfulness; inconsistent stories; and, resistance to work with law enforcement agencies (Gibbons and Stoklosa 2016).…”

“…Systemic and organisational factors that prohibit the identification, treatment, and referral of trafficked persons further contribute to invisibility in the health care system. These include the absence of linguistically matched or culturally sensitive services, limited organisational and practitioner capacity and resources (Davy, 2016); inadequate health provider formal education, identification, screening, and treatment protocols (Yarborough, Jones, Cyr, Phillips, & Stelzner, 2000) and unidentified service needs that extend beyond the health providers' expertise and effective interagency collaboration (Helton, 2016;Titchen, et al 2015). Cheshire (2017) additionally points to the health organisation's surrender of its moral responsibility and over reliance on well-intentioned, under-resourced and ill-informed medical professionals for not taking action.…”