DIAGNOSIS: HUMAN TRAFFICKING
Hospital workers train to recognize the signs and help victims get assistance
The woman arrived at the emergency department at Huntington Hospital on New York’s Long Island after she was hit by her boyfriend during an argument. Her situation raised concerns among the medical staff, which had recently been trained to be on the lookout for signs of sex trafficking.
An undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, she worked at a local “cantina” frequented by immigrants. Her job was to get patrons drinks and to dance with them, but many workers in those jobs are expected to offer sex, too. Her boyfriend didn’t want her to work there, which led to the fight, one doctor recalled.
As part of the intake process, the emergency staff asked the 36-year-old woman a series of questions about whether she had ever had sex for money, or whether she had to give someone else part of what she earns, among other things. The screening questions were part of a new program at Northwell Health, a 23-hospital system in the New York metro area that includes Huntington Hospital, to train staff and provide them with tools to identify and support victims of human trafficking.
No hard figures exist for how many people are involved in human trafficking, the term used when individuals are forced to work or have sex for someone else’s commercial benefit. Polaris, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for these people and runs help lines for them, said calls and texts to its national
hotlines have steadily ticked up in recent years, increasing the number of cases 13 percent between 2016 and 2017, to 8,759.
But health care providers frequently fail to recognize these patients’ situation. According to a 2014 survey of about 100 survivors of sex trafficking, 88 percent said that while they were being trafficked they had contact with a health care provider, typically someone in an emergency department.
“When trafficking victims come through the health care system but we don’t identify them, it’s a big missed opportunity,” said Dr. Santhosh Paulus, a family physician and site director of the Huntington Hospital’s family medicine residency program, who started the program at Northwell.
Northwell is one of a growing number of hospitals and health care systems that are putting such programs in place. They want to alert staff to be on the lookout for trafficking, much as they watch for signs of child abuse, domestic violence and elder abuse.
Since last spring, nearly 300 staff members at Huntington Hospital and a family clinic have received training in how to spot trafficking victims and how to help them.
Training is given not only to doctors and nurses but also to registration and reception staff, social workers and security guards. Restore NYC, an organization that assists people caught up in sex trafficking, provided the initial training to key staff, and a hospital task force trains the others. During the next few years, similar efforts will be rolled out at all of Northwell’s 23 hospitals, Paulus said.
Identifying victims of trafficking is not unlike identifying victims of other forms of violence, said Dr. Wendy MaciasKonstantopoulos, director of the human trafficking initiative at Massachusetts General Hospital.
One of the big red flags is when people delay coming in for medical care, such as waiting weeks to come in to get an injured ankle or sexually transmitted infection checked out, Macias-Konstantopoulos said. Or it may be a pattern of injuries that don’t make sense. Sometimes people are reluctant to explain their injury, or they come in with someone who seems overbearing. “Having a high index of suspicion is the first step,” she said.