The UCLA-UCSF ACEs Aware Family Resilience Network (UCAAN)
A multi-campus initiative that will leverage the substantial interdisciplinary resources of UCSF’s and UCLA’s public health sciences campuses to screen patients for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and develop, promote, and sustain evidence-based methods to address the impacts of trauma and toxic stress.
Since 2019, the Office of the California Surgeon General (CA-OSG) and the California Department of Health Services (DHCS) have led ACEs Aware, a statewide initiative to train clinical teams to screen children and adults for ACEs in primary care settings and to treat the impacts of toxic stress with trauma-informed care and evidence-based interventions. The ACEs Aware initiative is built on the consensus of scientific evidence demonstrating that early detection and evidence-based intervention improve outcomes. As ACEs Aware continues to evolve, the initiative is moving into a new organizational home within the University of California.
UCAAN is led and administered by two Principal Investigators (PI): Dr. Shannon Thyne, from the Department of Pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Dr. Edward Machtinger, from the Center to Advance Trauma-Informed Health Care (CTHC) at UCSF.
Over the past two years, UCLA Pediatrics and UCSF CTHC have collaborated with state and community partners to develop and broadly employ evidence-based training and guidance by leading the California ACEs Learning and Quality Collaborative (CALQIC), a 53-clinic, seven-region, two-year statewide learning collaborative. The partnership of CALQIC and ACEs Aware has laid the foundation for ongoing development, refinement, and dissemination of evidence-based tools and strategies to screen and respond to childhood adversity. UCAAN will provide the foundation for ensuring the sustainability, growth, and institutionalization of the state’s substantial investment in ACEs Aware and CALQIC to reduce the impact of toxic stress among California’s children and families.
UCAAN will focus on building and disseminating curricula for health professionals and other audiences to understand, address, and prevent the health impacts of toxic stress, as well as elevating protective factors, strengths, and resilience into the clinic and across networks of care.
