Despite the established benefits of early intervention (EI) for supporting long-term outcomes across a range of developmental domains, many families of autistic children receive inadequate intervention hours. This service deficit is particularly pronounced for families in rural and socioeconomically disadvantaged areas, and across New York State, where administrative and staffing challenges in the EI system present additional access barriers.
Parent-mediated intervention (PMI) programs, an approach to EI social communication intervention that involves teaching a parent to use intervention strategies with their child during play and daily routines, rather than a clinician, may offer a means to increase intervention dosage for autistic children in NYS.
Project GORGES examines a telehealth adaptation of the evidence-based and widely used Project ImPACT program (Ingersoll & Dvorcsak, 2019). As opposed to featuring exclusively individual sessions, participants alternate weekly between learning intervention strategies during group teaching sessions with other parents and individual clinician coaching sessions with their child. Participating in group programs has been shown to offer benefits for the self-efficacy and psychological health of the parents of children with disabilities; we hypothesize that the inclusion of a group element will not only offer benefits in these areas, but also in terms of parents' fidelity of intervention strategy implementation.