Lynne Stevens Memorial Addresses Human Trafficking and Health Care
On May 24 the Department of Family Medicine hosted the Seventh Annual Lynne Stevens Memorial Lecture, delivered by Elaine Alpert, MD, MPH, a scholar in family violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking at the University of British Columbia (UBC) who consults internationally on education, policy, public health and prevention.
During the lecture Alpert described the scope, presentation, and health effects of human trafficking and outlined strategies for identification and response. She also discussed how to facilitate collaboration between health care and other sectors of society. She noted that as many as 88 percent of trafficking survivors reported encounters with health care providers while being trafficked in a variety of settings. Alpert explained that health providers’ barriers to effective care included insufficient prior education, lack of practical experience, not knowing how to respond, and no private space, insufficient time or reimbursement. She concluded that with knowledge of key principles for trauma-sensitive practice, effective inquiry can begin the process of intervention to help trafficking victims. After the lecture the audience discussed ways that providers can help patients share their struggles with being coerced or abused; the next critical step is knowing how to offer and refer the patient to appropriate assistance.
Alpert is the lead author of Intimate Partner Violence: the Clinician’s Guide to Identification, Assessment, Intervention and Prevention, and Human Trafficking: A Guidebook on Identification, Assessment, and Response in the Health Care Setting. She also offers online continuing medical education about domestic and sexual violence. She previously was a member of the medical campus community serving as an associate professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the School of Public Health and as an assistant dean at the School of Medicine. She subsequently moved to Canada with a Fulbright to develop and teach interprofessional courses in violence prevention and intervention at UBC where she served as the Director of the Interpersonal Violence Prevention Program and created the UBC Violence Intervention and Prevention Connector.
The annual event honors Lynne Stevens, LICSW, BCD (1946-2009), former director of the Responding to Violence Against Women Program and an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine. She was a clinician, activist and researcher who worked locally, nationally, and internationally, specializing in evaluation of the quality of care offered to women who were victims of violence.