Pediatric Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Screening with PEARLS in a Safety Net Practice
About
This webinar, part of the ACEs Aware Science and Innovation Speaker Series, will feature Dr. Neeta Thakur and Dr. Danielle Hessler Jones, who will present on the paper, “Pediatric ACEs and Related Life-events Screener (PEARLS) and Health in a Safety Net Practice”. They will discuss the use of the PEARLS tool for identifying and facilitating early detection of and intervention for ACEs in a pediatric setting.
Learning Objectives
- Describe the frequency and distribution of adversities using the PEARLS tool in the University of California, San Francisco Benioff’s Children Hospital Oakland primary care clinic.
- Discuss the association between adversities identified by PEARLS with key pediatric biomedical, mental, and behavioral outcomes.
- Explore the benefits of using the PEARLS screener in pediatric primary care settings to identify children at high risk for important pediatric health outcomes.
Professional Credit
- This activity provides the following types of credit: AMA, AAPA, APA, ANCC, ASWB, ABIM-MOC, ABP-MOC.
- 1.0 credits are available.
- Activity document
Featuring
Neeta Thakur, MD is an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and a physician-scientist who specializes in pulmonary and critical care medicine. Her research program focuses on the short- and long-term health effects of multilevel stressors, with emphasis on historically marginalized populations. She has linked multiple data types (biologic, individual, and environmental) to demonstrate that environmental and social risk factors are geo-spatially distributed, disproportionately burden communities of color, and are associated with clinically relevant health outcomes. Dr. Thakur is the co-principal investigator of the Pediatric ACES and Resilience Study, a longitudinal cohort study that examined the negative biological and health effects of ACEs, and she is a co-developer of the PEARLS screening tool.
Danielle Hessler Jones, PhD, is Co-Director of the Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network (SIREN) and a Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research focuses on social care delivery in the health care sector, including understanding the impact and implementation of programs aimed at screening and addressing social adversity challenges alongside programs that seek to adjust care to fit an individual’s life context. As a health psychologist, Dr. Hessler Jones also brings experience in health behaviors and engagement and intersections with mental health. Her ACEs-focused research includes the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine-funded Collaborative approach to examining Adversity and building Resilience (CARE) project examining pediatric ACE screening and intervention in primary care settings, and building upon the PEARLS pediatric ACE screening and intervention study. Dr. Hessler also currently leads an ACEs Aware pilot project partnering with 12 Community Health Centers in California focused on the intersection between ACEs and social risk/social drivers of health screening and navigation assistance.