PANDORA'S BOX

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What Is Pandora's Box

The goal of Pandora’s Box is to teach medical professionals concrete skills to help them screen for and address sensitive family problems in their young patients, including parental substance abuse, child-witnessed domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and adolescent substance abuse.

This website provides a group of tools that individual health care providers can use to expand their skills in this area, and that medical education programs can use to incorporate this important information into their curricula.  Pandora’s Box provides:

• An on-line manual (in a printable, PDF format) that provides data on the effects of these sensitive family problems upon young patients and teaches residents interviewing skills that are not only effective in uncovering and addressing these sensitive issues, but that will also enhance their general medical interview skills. 

• Power Point presentations for chief residents, professors, supervisors, and and other educators to use in further exploring these issues with students and staff. 

• A centralized listing of referral services for all sensitive family issues – instead of searching through thousands of sites on-line to find a substance abuse treatment center for a patient’s father, or a domestic violence hotline for a mother.  

Pandora’s Box also provides information on a variety of associated topics – including how to make social service referrals effective – as well as important links, news and research updates, and professional association policy statements on sensitive issues. 

Opening and Closing Pandora’s Box began in 1996 as a training program for members of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).  The AAP asked COAF to help develop a training program to teach medical professionals concrete skills to help them screen for and address sensitive family problems in their young patients, including parental substance abuse, child-witnessed domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and adolescent substance abuse. 

To make this information more accessible to practitioners nationwide, the curriculum of the training session was expanded and converted into a manual.  The manual was written with the valuable insight and expertise from doctors in the field, and reviewed by a panel that included the chair of the AAP's Committee on Substance Abuse (view our advisors here).