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The Emergency Medicine Learning & Resource Center announces its new "Human Trafficking and Emergency Medicine" online learning module available on EMLRC Online. This online learning module aims to educate emergency medicine professionals on how to better identify these victims and help them.

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"An emergency department or EMS dispatch may be the only setting in which a trafficked person has an opportunity to be recognized and rescued," FCEP Board member Dr. Danyelle Redden, who is also a member of the Greater Orlando Human Trafficking Task Force. "Because of the complexities of trafficking situations, the victims are not necessarily easy to identify. It is essential for emergency care providers to understand the situational, behavioral, and clinical indicators of trafficking in order to identify the victims and intervene appropriately."

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The online module focuses on defining human trafficking and identifying people susceptible to trafficking. It also reviews the signs and symptoms of trafficked persons presenting for medical evaluation; the situational indicators of trafficking; how and when to approach a victim of human trafficking; the guidelines for evaluation of a potential trafficking victim and how to respond to an identified human trafficking victim; and comparing and contrast victims of human trafficking and domestic violence.

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The National Human Trafficking Hotline's 2017 Hotline Statistics identified Florida as the state with the third-highest reported cases of human trafficking with 604 cases in 2017. Approximately 30 percent of human trafficking victims encounter an emergency medicine professional during their time of enslavement and are not recognized as being trafficked. Emergency medicine professionals can play a key role in recognizing the signs that a patient is being victimized by human trafficking and are afforded a unique window of opportunity by which to offer help. Resources, like this online learning module, are important because they provide the tools to understand the wide-ranging problem of trafficking for EM and EMS professionals who might be the only individuals to have contact with victims, including when and how to act, can lead to the freedom of many of those currently enslaved.

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