Insights from Alexandra Crosswell, an assistant professor of psychiatry at UCSF, and her colleagues help us better understand the ways in which our brains and bodies are besieged by all kinds of stress — from global pandemics to more routine experiences, such as caregiving for an elderly relative or constantly feeling unsafe in a high-crime neighborhood.

Last September the California Campaign to Counter Childhood Adversity (4CA) conducted a survey with providers, community organizations, and organizations specializing in trauma-informed practices. Read the ACEs Connection summary of the results and recommendations of where we go from here.

The Center for Care Innovations (CCI) and its partners are now accepting applications for the California ACEs Learning and Quality Improvement Collaborative (CALQIC), a new program that will support clinics in screening for and responding to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in children and adults. Applications are due Tuesday, March 30.

Dr. Karen Mark, Medical Director of the California Department of Health Care Services, talks about the importance of ACE screening.

In the mid-2000s, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris opened a children’s medical clinic in the Bayview section of San Francisco, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. She quickly began to suspect something was making many of her young patients sick. Read Newsweek Magazine’s cover story on the increasingly recognized public health crisis of Adverse Childhood Experiences and what health care leaders around the nation are doing to address it.

Harvard Public Health, the magazine of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, explores how California’s first surgeon general, Nadine Burke Harris, MPH ’02, is carrying out the visionary agenda she has brought to medical care: finding the roots of disease in childhood adversity and treating the long-term consequences.

65% of adults in Modesto County have a history of at least one adverse childhood experience (ACE) and it’s likely the rate is similar for children. Read how encouraging providers to screen for ACEs will promote healing and improve health outcomes for California’s children, as well as how the ACEs Aware initiative utilizes existing systems of care to support the increasing need for mental health services and providers.

Nadine Burke Harris, MD, spoke about her vision and her groundbreaking work to reduce adverse childhood experiences across the state during a speech at the UC San Francisco Parnassus Heights campus. Read how stress can become toxic and what UC San Francisco is doing to help cut ACEs in half in one generation.

California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris discusses how applying the science of toxic stress will transform health outcomes in California. The 2020 Chancellor’s Health Policy Lecture was streamed live from Cole Hall at University of California San Francisco.

As of Jan. 1, 2020, almost 100,000 physicians in 8,800 clinics will be reimbursed for routinely screening Medi-Cal patients for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), in an effort California hopes will help prevent ongoing ACEs-related stress and disease. Here are nine big questions surrounding the change.