Eve Wintergreen. Photo: supplied
There are more people living in modern slavery exploitation in Australia today than there are living with Parkinson’s Disease.
People experiencing modern slavery are often hidden in plain sight, seeking refuge not in courtrooms but in hospitals, clinics and emergency rooms. Healthcare systems therefore play a pivotal role not only in providing care but also in securing justice for survivors. Eve Wintergreen is the St Vincent’s Health Australia anti-modern slavery project manager. She and her colleague Tarang Jain will be discussing modern slavery as a public health issue at the upcoming ANMF Australian Nurses & Midwives Conference.
Eve grew up in the deep south of the US where the legacy of slavery still resonates – so she learned early the painful consequences for communities when people are exploited. Alongside wanting to help alleviate suffering, this is part of what drew her to a career in nursing.
After moving to Australia, Eve worked across inpatient wards, primary healthcare, youth justice detention centres, in remote First Nations communities, and in homelessness outreach. Several years ago, she learned about the issue of modern slavery and healthcare, and it has defined her career ever since.
‘St Vincent’s engaged ACRATH (Australian Catholic Religious Against the Trafficking of Humans) around 2017 to conduct a literature review around how modern slavery impacts healthcare in Australia,’ she explains. ‘ACRATH then delivered education to nurses, which gave me the tools to recognise and respond to patients who presented with indicators that they may be in, or at risk of, situations of modern slavery exploitation.’
‘I couldn’t unsee what I was seeing.’
Eve describes the ‘a-ha!’ moment she had as she was completing the ACRATH training: ‘I couldn’t unsee what I was seeing,’ she explains. ‘And it was there in the quiet moments with patients, by the bedside, that I learned how powerful the tool of listening deeply is in walking with people through and out of these situations and into safety.’
Eve is now a complex psychosocial community care coordinator and project manager with the St Vincent’s Health Anti-Modern Slavery project, where she works with researcher Tarang Jain. Tarang’s work in the space began around the same time as Eve’s, when Australia’s Modern Slavery Act was enacted in 2018. The Act mandates large businesses – which include private and public healthcare enterprises – provide annual reports outlining how they identify and address the risks of modern slavery within their operations and supply chains.
Unfortunately, many healthcare organisations don’t score too well, Tarang notes. While most admit that ‘there may be links to various forms of exploitation within global supply chains responsible for surgical instruments or medical devices,’ he says, ‘they tend to ignore what’s happening locally.’
Through the Anti-Modern Slavery project, Eve, Tarang and their colleagues are working to change this, in partnership with the Australian Federal Police and others.
What is modern slavery?
‘People experiencing modern slavery situations may not understand or identify with this language,’ Eve explains. ‘People in exploitation may better recognise feeling forced, tricked or trapped for another’s gain or profit.’
Indeed, the criminal code defines it as ‘force, fraud or coercion for exploitation purposes’, and in the Australian context it can show up in various ways. Eve gives the example of a young woman (or a teenaged girl) who arrives into Australia on a student visa arranged through a person she believes to be a migration agent but who is in fact a ‘handler’ who takes her passport and ID documents on arrival and forces her into the sex industry by trapping her through debt bondage and forced substance dependence as a method of control.
‘She is isolated, trapped and, worst of all, feels it was her fault for accepting what she thought was an opportunity to study.’
How does modern slavery intersect with healthcare?
Healthcare professionals are often the first – and sometimes the only – point of contact for individuals trapped in exploitative circumstances.
Unfortunately, ‘people coming to receive care who are in situations of exploitation don’t present to triage and say: “Hi, I’m a victim survivor of modern slavery exploitation,”’ Eve explains. ‘They present in other ways. Modern slavery can often be mis-identified by healthcare workers as family violence. Presentations may also appear as homelessness, mental health crises, substance dependence or work injuries – but on a deeper look reveal people caught in desperate situations such as forced marriage, dowry abuse, forced labour, debt bondage, child exploitation or human trafficking.’
It’s also not just patients who may be at risk. Tarang notes that about 20 per cent of Australia’s healthcare workforce are migrant workers ‘and some have experienced modern slavery exploitation’.
How can members help their patients, clients – and colleagues?
‘No one can do this work alone, but we all have a responsibility to screen, educate, offer options for support, and document,’ Eve says. ‘One of the best skills we have is objective, time-stamped notetaking. That documentation of people’s presentations and indicators is a really powerful record in future if they decide to pursue the criminal justice pathway.’
Documentation may also help us to identify victim survivors in the first place, as the process of documenting may raise questions. ‘Sometimes it’s very quiet and hidden,’ Eve says. But there are red flags to look out for: they came in with injuries from physical abuse, or untreated chronic conditions; they don’t have ID, or Medicare, or they don’t seem to have a bank account.
To help clinicians with this work, in 2023 St Vincent’s Health Australia secured a Federal Government grant to develop and deliver a fit-for-purpose screening tool for health professionals to incorporate into their care. And because, as Tarang notes, ‘clinicians are quite resistant to the introduction of yet another tool or process’, they are piloting building this tool into existing domestic violence risk identification e-forms.
The grant also provided funding for Eve’s team at St Vincent’s Health to create a series of online training modules – based on de-identified real-life scenarios and developed alongside experts and people with lived experience – to help clinicians build confidence in identifying and responding in trauma-informed ways to people presenting for care who may be in situations of exploitation.
‘Since launch in late June 2025, we have seen an over 400 per cent increase [at St Vincent’s] in identifications of patients experiencing various types of modern slavery,’ Eve says. ‘Consistent identification is the first step to someone reaching safe exit from exploitation through appropriate linkages to services who understand their complex needs.’
Eve and Tarang are eventually hoping to expand this pilot to all health services across Australia, as modern slavery exploitation does not respect state lines or hospital catchment areas. The work of the team has been awarded by the Australian Federal Police in recognition of the important partnership between health and specialist modern slavery agencies in prevention and recovery.
Concurrently, they are running Australia’s first ever research into modern slavery survivor experiences of receiving healthcare during and after their experience of exploitation. Their hope is to continue to improve healthcare’s response by listening to survivor voices.
‘As nurses and midwives, we have a really privileged and blessed position to be able to work with people in the ways that we do,’ Eve concludes, ‘and that gives us such far-reaching power to change health for good, and to help our communities to become safer and healthier.’
If you have questions about modern slavery exploitation online trainings and education resources, contact them via AntiModernSlavery@SVHA.org.au.
This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of the handover member magazine.
