ABOUT

Dr. Zeev Kain first established the laboratory under the name, the Center for the Advancement of Perioperative Health (CAPH) in 1993 at Yale University to discover ways to improve the quality of life in children and adults before, during, and after surgery (considered the perioperative period). At the outset, CAPH research primarily focused on improving anxiety and pain in the perioperative setting. In 2008, after moving to the University of California, Irvine and CHOC Children's, CAPH has broadened its field of investigation to include multi-disciplinary approaches to managing pain and anxiety in a wide range of medical settings and situations and as such has changed its name to the UCI Center on Stress & Health (UCI CSH).

MISSION & VISION

The UCI Center on Stress and Health (UCI CSH) is dedicated to forming multi-discipline collaborations for the primary objective of assisting children and families manage pain, anxiety and stress surrounding the medical environment and disease burden.

To this end, we have targeted the following fundamental aims in response to our overall objective:

• Incorporate a unique, multi-disciplinary, biopsychosocial approach integrating a number of disciplines such as anesthesiology, psychology, pain medicine, psychoneuroimmunology and information technology.
  The problem of pediatric stress, pain and anxiety relating to medical procedures and disease burden is a large-scale, complex issue impacting millions of patients per year. A multi-disciplinary approach can accelerate research progress, hasten application of research findings, increase rigor, and improve external validity.
• Focus on family-centered care as a cornerstone.
  Central to CSH is the importance of the family. In 2001, the Institute of Medicine underscored the importance of family-centered medical care. Our research seeks to examine ways to support, strengthen and involve the family unit throughout the health care process.
• Explore use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).
  We believe that there is value in exploring non-traditional approaches to medical problems. Our strengths in rigorous methodology coupled with our unique multi-disciplinary approach provide an ideal framework within which to pursue this passion.
• Understand and move to reduce health disparities and pain in children.
  The impact of ethnicity and culture on the experience of pain in children represents a vital topic of multi-disciplinary and community based research at CSH. Cultural influences on pain expression and pain management have been neglected in the pediatric literature and are a main focus of CSH.