Health care settings provide key opportunities to identify trafficked individuals and connect them with potentially lifesaving help. On March 11, the Florida House unanimously passed legislation, 113-0, requiring nurses to complete human trafficking education as part of their initial licensure process. Approved May 21 by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the new law goes into effect on July 1 as an important next step for a state with the nation’s third-highest rate of reported human trafficking cases.
The school has a free online course to help Florida nurses meet this requirement.
Sponsored by Senator Gayle Harrell (R-Stuart) and Representative Robin Bartleman (D-Weston), the bipartisan bill (SB 340/HB 303) grew out of a call to action from University of Miami School of Nursing and Health Studies Dean Hudson Santos, who saw the need to expand on Florida’s existing law mandating human trafficking awareness training for nursing license renewal.
“Nurses go into practice without a requirement for human trafficking training until two years later, when they must renew their license. Our goal is to close that gap,” Santos said last January at the 2025 Annual State Attorney’s Office Forum on Human Trafficking. In just a year and a half, Dean Santos saw his proposed change adopted as statewide policy.
Santos credits University alumna Heidi Schaeffer, M.D. ’98, a Visiting Scholar at the school and nationally recognized expert in human trafficking awareness, as the driving force who connected him with key lawmakers.
Preparing New Nurses
Prior to this bill being passed into law, Florida’s new nursing graduates (about 20,000 annually) could become licensed to practice without the human trafficking education currently mandated for license renewal. Now, students who apply to take the NCLEX on or after July 1, 2027, will be required by law to complete a two-hour course on human trafficking to be eligible to sit for the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX), a prerequisite for full licensure.
“By ensuring nurses receive this critical training before entering the workforce, we are equipping them with the tools they need to identify victims of human trafficking and help connect them to safety and support,” said Representative Bartleman, the Democratic ranking member of the Health & Human Services Committee whose daughter also happens to be a newly licensed registered nurse (RN).
“CS/SB 340 will provide nursing students with the tools to recognize the indicators of human trafficking and safely intervene,” said Senator Harrell. “It will truly save lives.”
Human trafficking—defined as the recruitment, harbor, or transfer of people through force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of commercial sex or forced labor, human trafficking— is believed by authorities to affect at least 50 million people worldwide.
From Policy into Practice
In addition to leading policy change, the School of Nursing and Health Studies is pioneering curriculum development in addressing the complex issues associated with recognizing human trafficking indicators in the clinical setting.
Over the past five years, Deborah Salani, D.N.P., APRN, director of the school’s psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner program, and her faculty colleague Beatriz Valdes, Ph.D., RN —both members of the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office Human Trafficking Task Force—have taught 1,250 of the school’s nursing students to recognize and respond to the physical, social, and psychological indicators of trafficking through their novel simulation-based human trafficking curriculum.
“Dr. Valdes and Dr. Salani have been doing a phenomenal job with education from day one. Their latest contribution is extraordinary,” said University of Miami Miller School of Medicine nurse scientist JoNell Efantis Potter.
Potter, who cofounded the Miller School’s THRIVE Clinic (Trafficking Healthcare Resources and Interdisciplinary Victim Services and Education) over a decade ago and still leads it, is referring to the online training the faculty team debuted this past January, during National Human Trafficking Awareness Month.
The course is eligible for two Continuing Nursing Education (CNE) contact hours and is available free statewide thanks to longtime school donor Maria Lamas, who also established the school’s Maria G. Lamas Featured Speaker Series for Human Trafficking Education and Prevention Endowment. “In the words of Elie Wiesel, ‘Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim,’” said Lamas. Use this link to register for the free online course today.
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The University of Miami School of Nursing and Health Studies is accredited as a provider of nursing continuing professional development by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation, the governing body that sets the global standards for Nursing Continuing Professional Development and transition-to-practice programs.
