Meeting the Needs of Families During the Pandemic
Until 2020, a confident autism diagnosis could be made only in-person, using a play-based assessment tool that measures social communication and the other key indicators of autism, including restricted/limited interests and repetitive behaviors. Not surprisingly, face coverings which mask facial expressions muddle the effectiveness of this approach as a reliable diagnostic tool. When the COVID pandemic shut down many in-person visits, autism clinicians worldwide, including providers at the Duke Autism Clinic, helped find solutions for observing young children’s behavior via telehealth.
Clinic Spotlight: J. Nathan Copeland, MD
Although telehealth allowed clinic providers to pivot and meet families’ needs, two years later, things are still not back to the way we were before the pandemic.
In a Duke Health Media Briefing, covered in multiple national news outlets, J. Nathan Copeland, MD, and others explained the current crisis, calling it the “next wave of the pandemic.”
NC-PAL Rural Provider Consultation Program Expands as Need for Mental Health Care Increases
In collaboration with the Duke University School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, Duke Autism Clinic clinicians helped launch the North Carolina Psychiatry Access Line (NC-PAL). Since its inception, additional funding has helped expand NC-PAL, which now integrates a perinatal consultation program in partnership with The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.