California is leading the nation in our response to trauma.
Newsom approved a budget in June that will help California move toward universal ACEs screening, a goal that Nadine Burke Harris has long supported. The state is setting aside about $45 million next year to reimburse Medicaid providers in the state for trauma screenings of adults and children, and another $50 million to train 88,000 primary care providers on how to administer these screenings and to respond with trauma-informed care.
It’s not about re-inventing the wheel, it’s not about going out and requiring a ton of brand new resources or new money. It’s about how do we do a better job of early detection, early intervention and implementing the interventions that we know improve outcomes. All the research shows that early detection and early intervention work. How do we align that with the existing resources that are out there? A lot of it is coordination of what already exists.
One of the most important things a primary care physician can learn is how to guide patients around which symptoms may be related to history of adversity and what are the tools that they can use to manage and improve their outcomes. Tools like sleep, exercise, nutrition, mindfulness, mental health and healthy relationships. For some folks, there’s a fear that every person is going to require a ton of resources that we don’t have. In practice, in the places that have piloted this and those that have done it at scale, it turns out that’s actually not the case.
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