Dr. Sandie Morgan and Dave Stachowiak revisit the important influence of health care providers on human trafficking victims. They discuss new resources that have moved away from awareness, and into a more training focused aspect in order to identify and assist a trafficking victim. They discuss the significance of health care providers creating a four-step plan to assist victims through a safety plan, knowing how to refer, understanding mandatory reporting, and establishing a protocol.

Key Points

Resources

106 – Health Consequences of Human Trafficking

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Transcript

Dave: [00:00:01] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 185, Educational Resources for Health Care Providers.

Production Credits: [00:00:10] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave: [00:00:30] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie: [00:00:35] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave: [00:00:38] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie as we were preparing for today’s conversation on educational resources for health care providers, we were discussing some of the past episodes that we’ve aired. Actually, a bunch of episodes specifically diving in with health care providers and some of the resources available and this prompted me wondering well what is new? What’s the reason for us revisiting this topic? And It turns out there’s a whole bunch of things that are new, aren’t there?

Sandie: [00:01:16] Absolutely. I think there is a growing sense that our health care providers are seeing victims of human trafficking, both sex trafficking, and labor trafficking, and they need more tools to help them identify to assess and to take some sort of action. And I think one of the early episodes that we did on this was with Laura Letter. Her research has become seminal in pushing this agenda forward. One of the initiatives that are out there, and I’m going to pull it up really quick, is the infographic that S.O.A.R. did. S.O.A.R. is stop, observe, ask, and respond to human trafficking. And so, when people are approached in a health care environment, administrators, directors, nurses, doctors the first thing they want to understand is why do we need to do this. And the infographic that S.O.A.R. put together actually identifies two basic premises. One is that the number of endangered runaway youth that are likely to be sex trafficking victims is one in six of those runaways. And that’s a powerful number when you realize that one person that is able to stop for a moment observe what’s going on. What are the verbal and nonverbal indicators? Ask a question. I don’t know how many times a survivor has said to me if someone would have asked, but nobody asked. And then finally the end of that acronym stop, observe, ask, and respond and the response is possibly going to be different depending on the circumstances. So that one in six graphics is super important, but the other. And we interviewed Laura Letter in podcast Number 106 about her research and they use this statistic here 87.8%. The amount of human trafficking victims that have come in contact with health care professionals that didn’t realize who they were seeing. So, this is justification for really ramping up our focus on equipping health care providers.

Dave: [00:03:42] This is one of those areas Sandie that I know as we’ve talked through it over a number of years on the show I think I appreciate this more than I did. But at first, I came to this conversation I think where some of our listeners will come to, especially if you’re picking up the episode or one of the first episodes are listening to of thinking like well what’s the need to educate health care providers on human trafficking more so than any other profession? Of course, we all need education on it, but what you just said is so critical in that often the health care provider is the person that comes into contact.

Sandie: [00:04:20] Actual, physical contact.

Dave: [00:04:23] Not only with the victim but also potentially with the trafficker, potentially in the same room.

Sandie: [00:04:28] That’s why training is so important because you don’t want to take risks that might put your patient at risk. And I think for listeners that you’re not a health care provider, you know a health care provider that hasn’t jumped into this conversation yet. And Dave you may be sitting in your studio, you may be out training leaders, and doing all kinds of wonderful things where you don’t engage with trafficking victims, but you might see something when you’re driving by a sight. But you do know people who are physicians, and nurses, and radiology technicians, and so on and so forth. And I think we limit our ideas about who health care providers are. Health care providers are school nurses, and they are walk-in clinic workers, and sometimes they’re the receptionist in that walk-in clinic, and they’re the person who sees them for the very first time. Primary care physicians often think that this is not happening in their offices and yet we have story after story where a victim...