The Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders at UC Irvine will be starting our next FREE ECHO-Autism series this September 4th, 2019! These teleconference webinars are designed to bring the expertise of our HUB team of autism specialists to medical and educational professionals in the community, all without anyone having to leave their office.
We are looking to reach medical and educational professionals, in California and across the country, who might be interested in an online teleconference series focused on Autism and how to best serve individuals with autism of all ages both in medical practices and educational settings. We will be utilizing the ECHO model of tele-mentoring which allows high-quality specialist care and input for local communities. For more information on the ECHO model and the ECHO-Autism program in particular, please visit the website of one of our sister sites, The Thompson Center for Autism & Neurodevelopmental Disorders (https://thompsoncenter.missouri.edu/autism-training/echo-autism/).
Topics for the ECHO-Autism teleconferences will include: While You Wait for a Diagnosis, Anxiety and ASD, ADHD and ASD, What is Autism, Special Education Process, Supporting Families, Sleep and ASD, Autism Resources, Introduction to ABA, Irritability and ASD, Feeding Issues and ASD, Constipation and ASD, and many more.
The format of the upcoming ECHO is based off of feedback provided by past participants in our previous ECHO-Autism series. Based on their feedback, ECHOs will now last ONE HOUR ONLY so as to fit more readily into professionals' busy schedules. We will be holding ECHOs the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of each month from 12pm-1pm (PST). There will be a didactic presentation where a member of our HUB team will go over a PowerPoint focused on an area of their expertise. We are going to keep these didactic presentations to roughly 20 minutes and if additional time is required then we will break up the didactic into two portions to be held across two ECHO webinars. After the didactic portion of the ECHO there will be an opportunity for one case presentation per session, either from the ECHO-Autism participants or from one of our HUB team of specialists. Then there will be time for Q&A before wrapping up the ECHO at around 60 minutes total duration.
Attendance at these webinars is completely optional – we hope to see you as often as you are able to attend. We are also able to accommodate as many participants as would like to attend so if you know of colleagues or coworkers who you feel would potentially be interested in ECHO-Autism, please pass this information along to them. We are also currently exploring the possibility of being able to offer CME credits for attending the ECHO-Autism webinars. As soon as I have more information on this topic I will be sure to provide an update.
We will hold these webinars using Zoom (similar to Skype). We will be hosting the Zoom conferences so all participants would need to do is to either run the Zoom application on a desktop computer (by clicking a link I will have emailed to everyone) and join the audio via phone (calling a toll-free phone number, again provided in an email), or use the Zoom app on a smart phone or tablet to join the teleconference. All of the necessary information to join the Zoom teleconferences will be emailed to you one or two days prior to the ECHO-Autism webinar dates, as will de-identified case presentation materials.
If you have any questions or would like additional information about ECHO-Autism at The Center for Autism, please reach out to Meghan Dawson via email or phone call (mndawson@uci.edu).