IS YOUR CLINIC READY FOR 2020?

Screen for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress with FINDconnect

With the passing of AB 340 in California, DHCS in partnership with the California Surgeon General’s Office will offer training on screening for trauma using the PEARLS screener as well as trauma-informed care.

The Pediatric ACEs and Related Life-events Screener (PEARLS) was developed by the Bay Area Research Consortium on Toxic Stress and Health (BARC), a partnership between the Center for Youth Wellness, UCSF Benioff Children’s Oakland, and the Adversity Bio-Core (ABC) Bank at the UCSF School of Medicine and Pharmacy.

The PEARLS screener is broken out into two sections and has versions for children ages 0-12 and 13+. Section 1 screens for the ACEs tied to lifelong health and wellness challenges in the original Felitti and Anda research on ACEs1, while section 2 includes other risk factors for toxic stress not in the original ACE Study, but which have also been found to impact child and adult health.

FINDconnect has been used in clinic at Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland during the iteration process of PEARLS to screen children in the Bay Area all online without the need of paper screeners. This allows an expedited screening process on a per-child basis based on age by automatically serving up the proper screener. Furthermore, the results on positive screeners are instantly available with next steps for care and referral. Using FINDconnect to administer the PEARLS screener allows for real-time data to be seen based on all children screened, their results and shows what areas/neighborhoods are impacted.

1 Felitti and Anda (1998) ACE Study