Provider and Staff Education Promotes Childhood Adversity and Resiliency Screening in Primary Care

Abstract

Since the discovery of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in the 1980s by Dr. Felitti, a plethora of research has been done regarding the ACE phenomenon including associated risk factors, mitigating factors as well as short- and long-term ACE-associated consequences. ACEs are traumatic events that occur in childhood known to trigger chronic stress responses. Conversely, protective factors bolster resiliency which helps to mitigate ACE-associated adverse consequences. Healthcare providers and staff are in an optimal position to identify patients who are at high risk for acute and chronic mental and physical health problems by screening for both ACE and resiliency factors. However, the majority of primary care practices do not routinely screen patients. This may be due to the many barriers to screening, including the lack of ACE awareness and knowledge regarding screening practices. Therefore, the purpose of this DNP project is to promote the use of both ACE and resiliency screening in the primary care setting by increasing healthcare staff and provider knowledge regarding the magnitude of ACEs and about the efficacy of screening for ACE and resiliency factors in the primary care setting. The results of this project cannot conclude whether such education was beneficial due to a small sample size of five (N=5). However, of these, the pretest and posttest mean score comparisons showed improvement. Therefore, it would be interesting to perform the education through another platform to yield a larger sample size and to determine whether or not the education would indeed provide a benefit to primary care healthcare staff.