Strategic reporting

Campus Wellness plans and implements programs and services that are respectful, responsive, and adaptive to client preferences, needs, and values. In response to the Winter 2023 client satisfaction survey, 94% of clients reported they were comfortable sharing their concerns with their care provider, 94% felt their care provider prioritized their perspective, 92% were involved as much as they wanted in their care, and 94% were given an opporunity to ask questions or clarify information.

Mental Health Training Opportunities

Mental Health Literacy Certificate Program - for Employees

In addition to a range of wellness programs and student groups, Campus Wellness offers  mental health training opportunities to students and employees, including Question-Persuade-Refer (QPR) which had 102 participants and Recognizing and Responding to a Person in Distress had 188 participants during this period.

Another training opportunity is the Mental Health Literacy Program which is a virtual, five-module program available to employees that had a total of 218 participants during this period. After completing the program, 97% of responding participants could recognize someone in distress and 97% could respond to someone in distress.

Communications & Social Media

Steps to actively address concerns regarding brief counselling wait times:

There has been an increase in students seeking brief counselling on campus since the pandemic. We believe that this is due to a variety of reasons, such as mental health education and messaging resulting in reduced stigma around accessing Counselling as well as increased accessibility of appointments with the availability of virtual appointments. Demand for counselling is now maintained through the Spring term and as a result we have been unable to clear our waitlist before the influx of students in the Fall term.

How has CW been attempting to resolve their concerns with the brief counselling wait times? 

• We have hired a process improvement specialist who will review all processes to identify system bottlenecks as well as recommendations for timely access and service delivery.
• We have expanded Same Day counselling to two days a week in the Fall and Winter terms. This means that students can receive a single 90 minute session of counselling the same day (Wed or Thurs) by completing an online registration form.
• We have begun analyzing when students from equity deserving groups request a counsellor with similar lived experiences and how this may affect their wait times in order to advocate for more counsellors of a particular lived experience.
• We are reaching out to students on the waitlist to check-in on their mental health, such as to determine if they have more immediate needs that would require an urgent appointment.
• We are contacting students on the waitlist when counselling appointments become available due to late cancellations.

The Wellness Collaborative Community of Practice brings together anyone across campus that supports wellness, whether formally or informally. The sessions are intended to create a networking opportunityand to provide information that can support health equity and wellbeing. During this time period, there was a session to review the results of the recent Canadian Campus Wellbeing Survey and another session on applying a disability lens to wellness initiatives. There were 70 participants combined across these sessions.

Food insecurity, or the inadequate or insecure access to food due to financial constraints, is a significant issue for many post-secondary students today. To the Winter 2022 Canadian Campus Wellbeing Survey, 20% of University of Waterloo respondents scored as having low or very low food security. The Food Security Strategy Committee (FSSC) is co-chaired by Campus Wellness and University of Waterloo Food Services, with representation from faculty, staff, and student groups across campus and focuses on creating a strategy for promoting food security of our University of Waterloo students. The FSSC is developing a needs assessment that will launch in Fall 2023. This will help us to better understand the experience of University of Waterloo students and how to better serve them, specifically those who are disproportionately affected by food insecurity including equity-deserving groups such as international, 2SLGBTQAI+, Indigenous, and other racialized students.