One of the top three core services across UK Student Services is mental health |
AMOSSHE member Student Services departments providing mental health support |
Higher education providers involved in the project |
Infographic sources: AMOSSHE 2012 Members’ Survey.
BackgroundSupport for students with mental health difficulties now ranges across disability, counselling, mental health and wellbeing services in most universities. The steady increase of students with mental health difficulties accessing higher education is well documented, and supported by the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). The definition of mental health has broadened beyond the scope of what would have been a small diagnostically driven category and now embraces many wider degrees of depression, anxiety and personality difficulty. Concomitantly, the wellbeing agenda has expanded as the importance of prevention and recognition of mental wellbeing has become an accepted part of the support agenda. One result of this is that students with significant risk of harm to self or others are more actively supported to be at university and by a wider range of support services than before. What might have been the province of counsellors and medics is now something that is managed by counselling, wellbeing, disability and mental health services, GPs, residential services, personal tutoring systems and more. Mailbases (Heads of University Counselling Services (HUCS), AMOSSHE) have raised queries about the assessment and coordination of risk. At the University of Portsmouth the Mental Health Adviser, seconded from the NHS, is acutely aware of the risk of harm to others as well as self in a close student campus that is often portrayed as a safe developmental retreat from the world but is in practice a challenging and demanding environment. Each service will have its own method of assessing risk; these are not always coordinated, and ways of joining them up are often ad-hoc; groups called together on a needs basis with no underlying permanent structure, and confidentiality sharing agreements vary in their clarity and effectiveness. Sometimes this is pulled together under a Director of Support Services or equivalent, but university structures vary and management lines do not necessarily facilitate this, and final responsibility for decisions on risk can be unclear. | Here's the completed project report (PDF 518 KB): Mental health risk assessments across services – good practice and pitfalls Also, take a look at this presentation, which Nicola Barden made about the project at the 2013 AMOSSHE conference (PDF, 138 KB): |
Aims and objectivesThe project aims to enable managers of support services to have a clear understanding of good practice when developing mental health risk assessment policies and procedures in higher education. Proposal objectives:
MethodologyThe researcher will engage eight pre- and eight post-1992 institutions with a student population of 12,000+. The larger size is necessary in order to get sufficient complexity of communication into the mix. Engagement will be through the AMOSSHE website in the first instance, with the person/persons in the institution who understand themselves to be responsible for mental health risk assessment policies and practices. Each person will be invited to complete a simple online survey outlining provision in their institution and what they perceive as its strengths and weaknesses. The policies for each respondent university will be downloaded and compared. Each received survey will be followed up by a 45 minute phone call in which the respondent is asked to elaborate on the material. The phone calls will be systematically noted, but not transcribed, as this would take it beyond the scope of a small project. The notes would be subject to a thematic analysis drawing on the themes of pitfalls and positives. This would lead to:
Intended outputsA template and guidance document available to all AMOSSHE members. |