We are all so time poor that the requirements to keep ourselves up to date and informed can sometimes be overwhelming. Spending an hour or 90 minutes watching a webinar that contains a whole lot of “padding” may not appeal to us as a good investment of our time.

With that in mind we’ve created the eMHPrac/Black Dog Institute brief webinar series.

Most of these brief webinars are sponsored by eMHPrac so there is a bit of a focus on digital mental health resources but you will also find some sponsored by NSW health. The format remains the same irrespective of the sponsor, and timeslots for the live webinars are such that you can watch them while you are eating your lunch or before you have to cook dinner.

Each webinar is a briefly beautiful 30 minutes long, so the chunk they take out of your day is hardly noticeable. We present them at 12.30pm and again at 6.00pm on the same day. Content between the two timeslots is much the same, but as they are both live presentations, sometimes the interaction with the audience can lead the discussion in very different directions.

In the brief webinars we try to be as practical as possible. We look at basic CBT strategies (like mood monitoring and structured problem solving) that you may never have learnt to use or have forgotten about, as well as online resources. We also tackle more complex issues such as the best ways to talk to teens, strategies to help adults with ADHD and what we can do as health professionals about domestic violence. The webinars are a conversation between me and an expert clinician based on their knowledge and clinical experience and are always engaging and interesting.

We record these webinars and upload them onto our website for those who can’t attend live but there’s more! We also make many of them into podcasts and they really work well in that format. I think podcasts should never be longer than 30 minutes (who needs to be on the treadmill for longer than that after all!) so these offerings are just right!

If I’ve tweaked you interest you can find the webinar recordings (officially called the “Short Mental Health Interventions” series of webinars) by following this link.

If you’d prefer to listen to the podcasts you can find podcasts of all the Black Dog Institute/eMHPrac webinars here. These are the long form webinar podcasts and the brief ones together so you’ll get a chance to choose from all the things that might interest you in the list.

If you have joined the eMHPrac Community of Practice (the CoP) you will receive notifications about the live events in the email newsletter that we send to members every fortnight. That email also has links to interesting discussions on the CoP including the Clinical Scenarios so don’t let it go through to your spam!

All health practitioners are welcome to join the CoP. It’s a great place to share your dilemmas as well as your knowledge safely with other health professionals. You can join the CoP by following this link. (Just scroll down to the log in/ sign up button at the bottom of the page) See you there!