California Screens More Than 500,000 Children and Adults for Adverse Childhood Experiences
New partnership with University of California will advance ACEs Aware initiative.
The California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), in partnership with the Office of the California Surgeon General (CA-OSG), today announced that the ACEs Aware initiative has reached two key milestones less than two years after launching. To date, more than 20,500 California clinicians have been trained to screen for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and more than 500,000 children and adults across the state have been screened for ACEs.
Research shows that 62 percent of Californians have experienced at least one ACE. Emerging data show that the COVID-19 pandemic is leading to significant increases in ACE exposure for our current generation of children and youth.
“ACEs Aware continues to serve as an integral part of California’s response to the COVID-19 public health emergency and social and political stressors,” said California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris. “ACEs Aware is giving providers the tools and resources they need to help Medi-Cal beneficiaries identify and address stress-related physical and mental health concerns that can occur due to prolonged activation of the biological stress response.”
Additionally, Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Senate Bill 428, the ACEs Equity Act, which will significantly expand coverage for ACE screenings by requiring all health insurance plan contracts that provide coverage for pediatric services and preventive care to include coverage for ACE screenings. This includes Knox-Keene-licensed managed care plan contracts and health insurance policies issued, amended, or renewed on or after January 1, 2022.
Building upon these successes, ACEs Aware is moving into a new organizational home within the University of California. The newly created UCLA/UCSF ACEs Aware Family Resilience Network (UCAAN) will leverage the substantial interdisciplinary resources of two public health science universities - the University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, San Francisco - to develop, promote, and sustain evidence-based methods to screen patients for ACEs and advance evidence-based treatments for toxic stress.
The UCAAN team includes frontline primary care providers in the state's Medi-Cal system, led by Dr. Shannon Thyne, Co-Principal Investigator, and Professor of Pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Dr. Edward Matchinger, Co-Principal Investigator, and UCSF Professor of Medicine. Over the past two years, UCAAN leadership has integrated ACEs screening and treatment for toxic stress into busy clinical practices across Los Angeles and partnered with others across the state engaged in this work.
“Patients and their families, along with health care providers, have found this effort to be both possible and valuable,” said Dr. Thyne. “We now have the opportunity to fully realize the power of addressing ACEs and toxic stress.”
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