South Carolina LEND and Georgia LEND Collaborate at Regional Conference

May 1, 2015

The South Carolina annual regional Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics Update Conference, Nurturing Developing Minds, provided another opportunity for SC LEND and Georgia LEND to collaborate in February, 2015.

The conference, which is co-sponsored by the Greenville Health System Children's Hospital and SC LEND again drew an interprofessional audience of over 150 from across South Carolina and neighboring states. The conference targets providers of services for children with ASD and related neurodevelopmental disabilities and features presentations and break-out sessions led by national keynote speakers, and LEND faculty from the three sites in South Carolina. Featured speakers this year were Dr. Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp, Chief of the Developmental Disabilities Branch of the CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, who discussed Autism Spectrum Disorders : What's Behind the Numbers?, and Dr. Jeffrey Brosco, LEND Director at the Mailman Center for Child Development of the University of Miami (who was scheduled to discuss Social Determinants in a Life Course Perspective but ran into weather-related travel disruption). Presentations covered a broad range of topics including diversity and transition as well as the development of a Medical-Legal Partnership, that is the leadership project of the LEND Long Term (LT) Trainees in Greenville. A feature of the conference is a LEND Mini-Symposium where the LT's from each site present progress reports on their projects. For the second year the symposium featured trainees from both the South Carolina and Georgia LEND programs.

This collaboration has already had positive outcomes that have lasted beyond the conference. Dr. Dan Crimmins, Georgia LEND Director was a key note speaker at the 2014 conference, and Jessica Drennan, then a LEND trainee working at the CDC presented her project. Ms. Drennan has since been hired by the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control as Manager of the Title V Children with Special Health Care Needs program and is already working with SC LEND on a number of projects. We look forward to further fruitful collaboration between the programs.