International Trafficking: In the US and Abroad

Although largely framed as a legal issue, a social issue, and sometimes a geo-political issue, human trafficking is also a public health issue. Public health approaches consider all of these factors to take local information to make locally-appropriate interventions. It can also take local data to help feed our global pool of knowledge regarding this complex issue. Human Trafficking is both an individual as well as a public health issue. While direct health care is important, health professionals and organizations need to move beyond this and get involved in prevention, research, developing appropriate treatment guidelines, and monitoring and evaluation of health care interventions. We are against human trafficking because it harms people - so let's take approaches that will really work to mitigate, or even prevent, that harm.

In 2010, The Continuing Medical and Dental Education Commission of CMDA approved a working group to investigate the experience of medical missionaries with a view to providing information to assist mission agencies in setting a current and sustainable medical mission strategy. The PRISM (Patterns and Responses in Intercultural Service in Medicine) survey is a research report that summarizes those findings. This talk will involve a discussion of the salient, challenging, and sometimes surprising findings of what our full-time, long-term cross-cultural colleagues are facing today.