In an effort to better identify victims of human trafficking, Delaware hospitals will start to use the same techniques, making the state likely the first in the country to adopt a coordinated approach, health officials said Wednesday.

Right now, the state doesn't have a firm grasp on how many people are being trafficked in Delaware. The hope is that hospitals and health care providers will be able to identify more of these victims, potentially helping them escape this "criminal enterprise," experts say.

Delaware has become an attractive place for traffickers because of its place along the I-95 corridor — and critics say state officials have been slow to address the growing problem.

The Delaware Healthcare Association, a group that represents all the hospitals in the state, announced five recommendations Wednesday that will be implemented at all Delaware hospitals within the next year.

It includes: Educating the entire hospital staff about human trafficking, using a specific assessment to identify red flags among potential victims, following a step-by-step process to then respond to suspected trafficking, using a specific hospital code for trafficking victims to collect statewide data and following a memo on how to best address minors who are being trafficked.

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"It's been a surprise, a sort of veil lifted off when people think about who's in their waiting room," said Leslie Brower, project director of trauma informed approaches for the state's Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health.

"You may think you may have a domestic violence survivor situation," she said. "Instead what you realize is that you have this different lens."

In a 2014 survey of 100 survivors of sex trafficking, 88 percent said they had some type of contact with a health care professional, often in emergency rooms and hospitals. But in most cases, doctors and nurses don’t realize they are working with people being trafficked.

These victims, who tend to be young girls and women, often come to a hospital's emergency room after they have overdosed, tried to take their own life or been beaten or diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease.

There have been 85 reported cases of human trafficking in Delaware since 2012, including 16 last year, according to the National Human Trafficking Hotline.

Last month, three Delaware men were convicted of trafficking minors for sex through Backpage.com, a classifieds website that has been involved in thousands of child-trafficking reports.The men ran a prostitution ring from 2012 to 2017, where they trafficked women and girls throughout the mid-Atlantic region, the Department of Justice said.

There are bills in front of the legislature designed to help victims of human trafficking. The Senate unanimously passed a bill on Tuesday that says no one younger than 18 can be convicted of prostitution in Delaware.

And a bill that has unanimously passed in the House in April would pardon, vacate or expunge most crimes a person commits while they were a victim of human trafficking. This would not include violent felonies.

To help health care providers catch red flags of trafficking, the Delaware Healthcare Association created questions to serve as a guide when interviewing patients.

Annamarie McDermott, a Saint Francis Hospital social worker who helped develop the recommendations, said the questions include asking whether a patient knows where they are, if they can come and go as they please, whether they have identification and, if they work, whether they have control of their money.

There's also a developed algorithm response for providers, which is a step-by-step guide for how they should respond in certain situations, particularly among victims who are minors, McDermott said.

Every intervention is going to be different, health care officials said. In some cases, providers might call the human trafficking hotline on a victim's behalf or provide the victim with information.

In the cases of human trafficking among adults, the patient needs to self-identify that he or she a victim of human trafficking, experts say.

"It's important that we plant the seed," McDermott said. "Maybe the next time or the next time or the next time they come in front of a provider, they're able to say 'Something is not right. I need to tell you about this.'"

Contact Meredith Newman at mnewman@delawareonline.com or 302-324-2386. Follow her on Twitter @merenewman.