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Adverse Childhood Experiences

This course explores the impact of adverse childhood experience and trauma, focusing on how we can improve the recognition and support that we offer to people, including through the delivery of trauma-informed care. 
Format

Online
Course

time to complete

1-2 hours

Starting date

Any time

cost

Free

What you are going to learn

A few more words about this course

Our childhood, our upbringing, affects us throughout our lives. Our health as adults – physical and mental – is determined by many factors, not least the things we were exposed to and experienced as children.

Children the world over are currently experiencing trauma and adversity that impacts upon their health, psychological and emotional wellbeing, now and in the future.

Many adults have experienced traumatic childhoods and gone on to have happy, healthy lives. And many have not. 

This module explores the effects of childhood trauma and adverse experience. Once you have completed it you should be able to:


  • Appreciate that what happens in childhood makes a difference to a child’s mental and physical health, impacting on the rest of their life
  • Describe ‘Adverse Childhood Experiences’ (ACEs) as a framework for understanding childhood trauma
  • Appreciate the long-term physical and psychological consequences of exposure to childhood trauma
  • Recognise common responses to trauma, including hypervigilance, dissociation, disconnection, and shame
  • Start to think about how to routinely and sensitively enquire about a history of trauma and adverse experience
  • Understand and begin to incorporate trauma-informed care into your personal practise
  • Think about yourself and the impact that caring can have

Course reviews

Thank you so much for creating this resource and putting it out for free! I am so glad to have done it, and have recommended it to lots of people in my network. I appreciated the variety of materials and presentation. It's sometimes so hard to know what to do and say in practice and having a direct link to useful resources, clear outcomes etc was really great and helpful. Thank you. 
An excellent module - powerful and informative content; links to relevant resources and further reading; easy and aesthetic to navigate. 
As a professional working with both adults and children who have experienced numerous ACEs, I thought this module was a great introduction to ACE informed work. Thank you.
It was an amazing module. I loved the presentation, the fact that it felt a lot more interactive than other modules i had done really helped me engage with it. I liked the fact that we had Molly's story to set the scene and the whole module really flowed. It is probably the first module that I have actually enjoyed completing as there wasn't any pressure of answering questions.