Childhood Trauma: The Single Greatest Unaddressed Public Health Threat

Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs) are defined as experiences during childhood that caused extensive stress and can include events such as abuse, disasters, violence, or neglect. These ACEs are shown to have great effects on the psychological as well as physiological well-being of the individual into adulthood, and have been linked to disorders such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cancer, obesity, alcoholism, hallucinations, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For this reason, ACEs have been considered "the single greatest unaddressed public health threat facing our nation today" (Kalmakis & Chandler, 2015). Nurses are in a unique place in caring for individuals in which they can screen patients for adverse childhood experiences and trauma and teach strength-based resilience in order to interrupt this disease progression. As a part of our thesis, we created an educational module to inform nursing students of this study.