DMU Counselling and Wellbeing 2016 Annual Report

1) Demand for counselling and coaching

Demand for one to one appointments has almost doubled in the last five years. The academic year 2015/16 saw the sharpest spike in demand we have ever seen with a one third (33%) increase on the previous 12 months (an extra 268 referrals). With students having an average of 4 sessions each, that equated to around 1000 extra hours of client work. The team have done a great job in managing this and seeing all of the students.

Referral chart for 12 month period 01/07 to 30/06 comparing 2015/16 to 2014/15 and 2010/11 when data was first collected. The number of referrals for face to face counselling (F2F), e counselling and coaching is shown on the vertical axis.

1000 900 800 700 600 F2F couns 500 E couns 400 Coaching 300 200 100 0 2010/11 2014/15 2015/16

2015/16: 1072 referrals (947 counselling, 70 e counselling, 55 coaching)

2014/15: 804 referrals (735 counselling, 13 e counselling, 56 coaching)

Around 2-3% of those are students returning for another episode of counselling. Commentary

It is hard to be certain as to the reasons for this, but there are some clear trends.

 Greater awareness about counselling together with reduced stigma. More students have previous experience of counselling. Word of mouth referrals have increased.

 A growing number of young people who are struggling to deal with the problems of life. It would be wrong to generalise, but there has been a clear increase in presentations of anxiety. This is part of life and is not necessarily a bad thing (it says that issues in life are important and therefore have meaning!) What can be lacking is coping mechanisms and emotional resilience.

 Increase in referrals from students with acute and chronic mental health difficulties where other in house or NHS support may be a better fit then short-term counselling, the issue often being whether alternative support options are available.

Action

Demand needs to be managed differently as it likely to stay high with healthy DMU recruitment. Resources will not grow to match this. The disability and mental health inclusion teams have also experienced increases. With this in mind the welfare teams are introducing a triage system (Single Point of Access or SPA) In September 2016. All welfare applicants will have a thirty minute SPA appointment before applying to other services.

This will enable earlier interventions and a holistic assessment and prioritisation of needs. Seeing students within a few days of application has clear advantages in terms of ‘nipping things in the bud’ and managing risk. It will also help to negate some of the negative comments about counselling waiting times (see section3 –student feedback). Practical advice and self -help will be offered and support options identified such as mentoring or emotional wellbeing workshops. NHS support options for students are also being explored (from mild to severe/chronic mental health issues). 2) Impact of counselling on academic outcomes

The CIAO measure (Clinical Impact on Academic Outcomes) looks at retention, achievement and the student experience at the start and end of counselling. In total 361 students completed both a pre and a post measure. What you hope to see is

a) a green (post) bar that is higher in one or both of the first two categories (Not at all and Only occasionally) so more students are able to just get on with university life!

b) A green bar that is lower for the last three categories (Sometimes, Often and Most of the time) which shows that negative impacts have been reduced.

c) This is pretty much the case as you can see. The exception being no change in the relatively small number of students (15) who wanted to leave their course ‘Most of the time’ before and after counselling.

Retention

72% of students considered counselling to have helped them to stay at university. The graph below also shows pre and post counselling retention figures. Improvement may be due to several factors, but counselling encourages students to take positive actions including seeking more support from others (tutors, friends etc). Achievement

73% considered counselling to have helped them do better in their academic work

Student experience

84% considered counselling to have improved their overall student experience

Finally

● 83% said counselling improved their skills.

● 82% said counselling helped to improve their self-esteem.

● 88% said it helped feel more positive about their future 3) Student survey

We carried out a Survey Monkey of students who have had at least one counselling session between. This year 355 students were invited to take part and 120 did (34%). ● 50% waited 12+ days to start counselling (36% in 2015) Sample quotes ● 59% found the wait to be “Counselling is a fantastic place to begin tackling issues. You really acceptable do feel better. You get the feeling you are doing something to ● 71% stated study concerns as the reason for attending alleviate your concerns, which in turn provides a boost in self-esteem ● 9.5% of students had more and confidence. I cannot stress (enough) the importance of talking to than 6 sessions (22% in 2015) someone about your issues in a safe and secure environment free ● 55% of students said they had from judgement”. enough sessions for their needs (66% in 2015), 29% not enough and 16% neutral

● 5% of students said they did not feel understood and 5% that it did not help

● 95% felt safe and able to talk

● 81% felt understood

● 90% said counselling was supportive and helpful

● 94% would recommend to a friend or return for more counselling themselves if needed “I was always nervous about going to counselling. I was torn between

“Am I being a drama Queen?” or “Does this really mean I am messed up?”

Counselling opened my eyes to so much. I learnt about myself. Some The last two are shown pictorially below. 5 filled in sessions were really hard, but I felt stronger as a person after facing them”. people =100%! Comment

The average wait from 01/10/15 to 30/04/16 was four weeks due to the one-third increase in demand. Since that peak time the average has been just under one week. Clearly having more counselling resources would help and some students commented on the need for this. The SPA triage will however ensure that there are earlier interventions. We will reinforce the message to counsellors that student can have more than six sessions where it is therapeutic to extend sessions, but we do need to be mindful of demand as well. It may be that some students need longer term therapy that we are not resourced to deliver. Overall this is a positive survey particularly considering the pressures on the service. 4) BME project

We have reapplied for our service accreditation (quality kite mark) which is renewed every five years. As part of this we put together a plan to address how we can reach out to students who make less access of our service than the DMU population (demographic). This includes BME students. International Students, students from the LGBTQ community and males! As we are increasing working in an integrated way with other welfare teams we have developed this as a SAAS welfare project.

Given that issues like the BME attainment gap has been recognised as a high priority, it makes sense to initially prioritise this population. In the last 12 months (01/07/15 to 30/06/16) 33% of our clients have been from the BME community compared with around 50% for DMU as a whole.

The project will involve focus groups of students and talking to other welfare teams about any access issues/barriers and any actions we can take. We want to hear from students who have accessed services and those who have not so we will be liaising with the SU and the Muslim Imam. We want to hear views about issues/barriers and also good news stories where BME students who have found services to be beneficial and can communicate this to other BME students.

A report and action plan will be produced by February 2017.

5) Self –help

Apart from the normal range of self-help options (details on our website www.dmu.ac.uk/counselling) we are now making more use of Twitter to communicate helpful guidance about common issues like homesickness. We have also reviewed mental health apps, details of which will go on our website. 6) Coaching interventions and workshops

An exciting area for us is the growing requests for coaching interventions (workshops, training and consultancy) for both students and staff in supporting them in their student contacts. Mark Evans is leading the team in this area. Examples include helping the Pharmacy course leaders with some revisions to their course and running workshops on managing stress and emotional resilience for pharmacy students. He has worked with Abigail Moriarty offering coaching skills and models to Personal Tutors. He also supports other teams where some coaching knowledge and skills could be helpful such as Careers and Employability.

The team have run an increasing number of workshops (16 for the Pharmacy programme and 18 for CLaSS such as PhD support with wellbeing, Mindfulness and Managing stress).

7) New team members

We welcome four new associate (qualified volunteer) counsellors. They are Fatima Adam, Jilna Surani, Sunny Chohan and Donna Liburd. We will be uploading a team photo onto our website in October!

8) Service accreditation

Finally we are still one of only a few university counselling services that have a service accreditation through our professional body (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy). After five years we have needed to submit an application to renew this and this has now been successfully awarded for a further five years. The assessors commented.

“The initiation of the Project plan (Gateway 0 Strategy) is a significant innovation and the assessors were delighted to see this in place. Equally, the additional of the statement on the student homepage regarding access to those under-represented in the service shows the willingness of the Service to embrace the ethos of the accreditation process and address the concerns raised. Well done.

It is clear that the DMU Student Counselling Service is providing a comprehensive, professional service to its users.

In summary, DMU should be proud of its Counselling Service and its achievements to date”.