The aptly named Great Starts program at the Helen Ross McNabb Center in Knoxville, TN, provides a six-to-nine month residential treatment and two-year follow-up program for pregnant mothers and moms with newborns recovering from substance abuse. Earlier this year, curious about the early childhood history of its residents, the center started asking the women about their ACEs history. The results would not have been surprising to those familiar with ACEs: Of the 16 moms who filled out the 10-question ACE survey from the CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study, the average score was a whopping 6.4.
Using the ACE survey, says mental health clinician and family treatment program manager Sarah Long, could allow staff members to identify those potential risk factors these new parents experienced as children that might in turn affect the parenting of their own children.
Great Starts hasn’t yet formally trained its 11-person staff in ACEs or determined how to integrate the ACE histories of its mothers into treatment protocols. However, the team has been trained in trauma-informed care and understands the background of why they do ACE scores, which they are now administering on all parents in the residential program.
In the meantime, Long says, she’d “love to hear how programs like ours use the ACE scores in treatment.”
[For more on this story, by Sylvia Paul, go to: http://acestoohigh.com/2015/12/27/aces-histories-for-mothers-recovering-from-substance-abuse/]
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