A Theory‐based Didactic Offering Physicians a Method for Learning and Teaching Others About Human Trafficking

Emergency clinicians are on the frontlines of identifying and caring for trafficked persons. However, most emergency providers have never received training on trafficking, and studies report a significant knowledge gap involving this important topic. Workshops often employ a “train‐the‐trainer” model to address clinicians’ knowledge gaps involving various topics (including trafficking). By offering participants knowledge and skills needed to both understand relevant content and teach this content to future learners, this model aims at promoting widespread dissemination of essential information. However, current train‐the‐trainer workshops typically involve full or multiday sessions and employ multimodal instructional techniques, making them time and resource intensive for both participants and facilitators. To address these challenges, we created a 50‐minute train‐the‐trainer workshop to teach emergency clinicians the knowledge and skills needed to recognize and care for trafficked patients while providing instructional techniques to teach learners this content in the clinical environment. Learning theory and principles informed the choice of instructional methods and were employed when designing the paper‐based learning guides that functioned as this intervention's primary instructional resource. Guides contained detailed scripts used to perform role‐playing exercises. These “scripted guides” were designed for participants to learn important content while simultaneously practicing techniques to teach this content to one another. They provided the scaffolding necessary to independently direct learning during the workshop (with minimal facilitator intervention), while also being carefully formatted and organized to create an accessible tool for future use during clinical teaching. The session was implemented at the 2018 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana. Based on participants’ self‐assessment using a retrospective pre–post test, the workshop was successful in creating a train‐the‐trainer model that is brief, requiring minimal facilitator resources and offers instruction on both content knowledge and instructional methods to disseminate this knowledge to future learners.