COUNCIL State of the University |
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November 10, 2015, Volume 62, No. 13 |
Beth Winkelstein, Vice Provost for Education
Thank you, Provost Price. I had the honor of joining this team in working on the continued attention and efforts around the report of the Task Force and on our continued work to focus on and pay attention to the psychological health and well-being of our campus. As Provost Price already said, the Task Force on Student Psychological Health and Welfare really gave some very careful attention to this and issued their report in February of 2015. What I would like to do is actually to comment first that while I have joined the team, the team is a big one. There has been partnering across colleagues and across campus, and in particular those in VPUL, those in CAPS and those in a new advisory team, which Dr. Alexander will talk a little about. I have the honor of working with Bill and Anita and others within this advisory team and of introducing them and giving you a little more information about the progress towards meeting those recommendations and our look towards the future because, as Provost Price says, simply meeting those recommendations is not enough. This is something that we take seriously and want to continue to push forward.
I am going to introduce Anita Mastroieni, who is the director of the Graduate Student Center. She was consulted often by the Task Force and has been involved in a variety of efforts around campus and with the new student orientation as well as serving as a member of the Jed Advisory Team, which you will hear more about in a few minutes.
Bill Alexander, as many of you know, is the director of CAPS. He was a member of one of the working groups of that Task Force and is chairing Penn’s Jed Advisory Team. Together they will provide you with an update on the progress and the actions that Penn has taken and will present you with some of the ongoing efforts of the advisory team. I am now going to turn it over to Anita, who is going to walk through some of those recommendations and actions.
Anita Mastroieni, Director of the Graduate Student Center and the Family Resource Center
Thank you, Beth. I am happy to talk about these updates on the recommendations of the Task Force. There has been an awful lot of progress, so there is a lot to say. The Task Force’s report and the recommendations were organized into four broad categories: communication and education; centralizing information about mental health resources; engaging faculty, staff, students and families; and finally, optimizing resources for CAPS. I will go through the recommendations in those categories.
Communication and Education
In the category of Communication and Education, the Task Force recommended that the entire University community work to reinforce messaging about the needs for self care and looking out for each other. This fall, those efforts could be seen at Freshman Convocation in the Welcome Back messages that our students received from deans and administrators and in the online graduate student resource guide. This messaging will remain ongoing and we hope that over time this messaging becomes part of the culture on our campus.
The Faculty Council on Access and Academic Support developed a checklist that was distributed to all faculty in the undergraduate schools with suggestions about how to help students thrive as scholars, as well as links to University resources. In addition, CAPS and the Faculty Senate disseminated information about warning signs of distress among students to our faculty and staff. Working with students, the Weingarten Learning Resources Center has begun the Penn Faces resilience project. The broad objective of this project is academic wellness by helping students learn to manage setbacks and to see those setbacks as opportunities for growth and learning. To date, they have shot several videos and they have engaged with a web design company and the public launch for that project will be in mid-January.
One subject found to be in need of greater clarity was leaves of absence. The four undergraduate schools working with the Provost’s Office have better coordinated the communication of their leave policies. With the help of The Daily Pennsylvanian, we are working to de-stigmatize leaves and help students see that sometimes a leave can be a good way to continue your success at Penn. These discussions have now been started with graduate deans in the graduate schools and that work will be ongoing this year.
Centralized Information about Mental Health Resources
As the Provost mentioned, the University’s HELP line was implemented in December. Calls are answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by Division of Public Safety professionals who have been trained in mental health resources by CAPS professionals. A wellness web page is in development as well that will complement the HELP line by centralizing information online about our resources. CAPS, along with student collaboration, has developed a wellness app that is currently in beta testing and we invite all students to join in that beta testing. If you are interested, please contact Bill Alexander in CAPS, and he will get you the information about that app. We hope that the app will be launched later this semester.
All entering first-year undergrads took part in Thrive at Penn (TAP), which is an online pre-orientation program that prepares our students to make healthy choices and provides information about the resources available at Penn. There are plans later this year for all undergraduates to complete the program in addition to the freshmen who have already done so, and we are looking to develop a similar program for graduate and professional students next year.
Engaging Faculty, Staff, Students and Families
Some 450 faculty and staff and 580 students have completed the CAPS i-Care training to date. We are really excited about those numbers and we are also excited to tell you that i-Care is continuing, so for faculty, students and staff who have not yet had the opportunity to go through the training, we encourage you to do so. The Faculty Senate has been working with the Provost and Deans to launch a Wellness Ambassadors program, which trains faculty ambassadors in each of the undergraduate schools to serve as liaisons among faculty, CAPS staff and students. The “Penn Benjamins” is a new student-led peer counseling group with extensive training by CAPS staff and we are excited that they are now meeting regularly with students across campus. The Thrive at Penn modules that I described earlier were also made available to the parents of our freshmen so they, too, are familiar with the resources at the University to support their children. As we extend that program to all undergraduates, we will likewise extend it to the parents and families of all of our undergraduates.
Optimizing Resources for CAPS
Under Optimizing Resources for CAPS, all the recommendations regarding CAPS have been implemented. One result is that CAPS has been able to offer initial appointments for non-urgent care within a week of the triage assessment. Three years ago, that time had approached three weeks during peak times of the year. We are happy to report that during the first three months of this fiscal year, CAPS offered direct clinical service to more students than at any other time in its history. Collaboration with Penn behavioral health and schools with expertise in mental health has continued and has continued strong. And finally, CAPS and VPUL continue to work closely with students on the CAPS advisory board and with students on Active Minds, as well as with students, faculty and staff on the advisory team, which Beth referred to and Bill Alexander is now going to tell us much more about.
Bill Alexander, Director of Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS)
Thank you, Anita. Another recommendation of the Task Force was to establish a mental health oversight group with two important functions: firstly, to establish an administrative structure that could review a wide range of mental wellness issues—including policies, procedures, services and campus culture—along with the authority to make or recommend changes in any areas of concern that were identified; secondly, to formalize this structure in such a way that the conversation and the concern about mental wellness on campus would be sustained as a core part of campus life. Simultaneously, Penn engaged in an insightful and collaborative process to become a member of the Jed and Clinton Health Matters Campus Program. Working with the clinical staff of the Jed Foundation, Penn established an Advisory Team to oversee the work of the Campus Program. The establishment of the Advisory Team will not only fulfill the recommendation of the Task Force to have an oversight group, but will ensure the ongoing review of mental health on Penn’s campus for years to come.
Let me tell you a little about the Jed and Clinton Health Matters Campus Program. As many of you know, Jed is a very venerable organization founded on suicide prevention and mental health. Those are the two goals of the Jed Foundation. The Clinton Foundation had an interest in alcohol and prescription drug misuse. In the summer of 2014, they got together and formed this program, which they jointly sponsor, called the Jed and Clinton Health Matters Campus Program. It is a pretty rigorous application. We filled out a long survey and submitted it to the clinical staff of the Jed Foundation. They reviewed it and they gave us very detailed feedback specific to Penn about how we did in many areas, which I am going to tell you about. We were accepted into the Campus Program. It is not only benefiting us internally; we are members of a large national program to which many universities belong—and it forms a relationship between the Advisory Team here at Penn and the Jed Foundation Clinical Staff to oversee this program. It was initiated by the survey, as I said, and reviewed by the staff. The Campus Program is a 4-5 year commitment to work with the Jed clinical staff. There is regular review with the Jed clinical staff. They are amazing consultants. They are made available to the Advisory Team on a daily basis if we want. They are just a phone call away. We have open consultation with them and they come down to see us.
The Campus Program is essentially divided into nine parts. It is referred to as the framework of the Campus Program. I’m going to just list them briefly. Each one is enormous and has lots of detail. Feel free to find me and I will fill you in. You can get the scope just by listening to the broadness of the nine areas. The first area is to review policies, systems and strategic planning as it pertains to mental wellness on your campus. The second is to develop life skills of students, faculty and staff. The third is to foster connectedness, not only between individuals in our community, but also between structures and programs. The fourth is to foster academic performance and how it relates to mental health and mental wellness on our campus. The fifth is to look very directly at student health and wellness, including everything from diet to mental health. The sixth is to have a strong program to identify students at risk, not only at risk for mental health issues, but physical health as well. The seventh is to increase health-seeking behaviors among members of the community and to know where to turn for help for any member of the community. The eighth is to provide mental health and substance abuse disorder services directly. You must have a direct service component. And finally, the ninth is to examine means restriction and environmental safety of your buildings and your campus and how this contributes to the mental wellness of your campus. It is a huge and far-reaching endeavor.
The Advisory Team, co-sponsored by the Vice Provost for Education and the Vice Provost for University Life and chaired by the Director of Counseling and Psychological Services, is made up of 20 members and it is a very transparent process. It is made up of faculty, students and staff, fairly evenly divided, and it reports directly to the Provost. The 20 members come from all over campus and we have already met once this fall. For the first time, we are in the process of taking those nine areas that I described and all the subareas within them and organizing them into some sort of a framework where we can begin to divvy up the work amongst the members and look at it, dig into the weeds and examine where we stand on all the issues within those nine areas. We will probably meet for the next time later this semester to see how we are doing and we hope to invite the Jed clinical team to meet with us personally early in the spring term and just go over their vision of how we are doing so far.
I will comment that the clinical staff of the Jed and Clinton program responded very favorably to our initial survey. Just with the Task Force findings, we are already doing a lot and they were fairly satisfied. We still have a lot of tweaking to do in a lot of areas that we hadn’t even thought of. It is such a huge umbrella program. But I think that we are off to a very good start. The thing that I am excited about personally is that the conversation has begun and that there is a structure in place to guarantee that it will go on for years to come. I think that this is good for Penn. Thank you.
Related: University Council Open Forum
Related: PPSA and WPPSA: Recognizing and Responding to Interpersonal Violence on Campus
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