Healthier Campus Community

Mental health and well-being have been identified by both undergraduate and graduate students as a key area of concern. That's why the healthy campus community key action area will significantly advance activity in this area.

Impact on Student Experience

Initiative Highlights

The Healthier Campus Community working group had two main flagship projects covering improvements for student accessing mental health supports, and the settings that they learn in, MySSP (My Student Support Program) and Well- being in Learning Environments 2.0.

  • MySSP is a 24/7 mental health service that provides services in a variety of languages and modalities to increase access for students who need support.
    • Augment existing in-house supports, and raise awareness of mental health concerns through educational resources.
    • SFU students outside Canada or North America with MySSP are provided coverage and assistance at any time, with various languages supported by a wide network of healthcare providers.
  • The Well-being in Learning Environments 2.0 aims to provide instructional staff with updated resources for creating conditions for well-being in the classroom. 
    • To expand and further engage the network of faculty members who are committed to foster well-being in their teaching practice, and to evaluate the impacts on students and faculty.
    • This project also includes developing well-being resources for graduate students and supervisors, in partnership with the Supervision for the 21st Century Working Group.

10 Conditions for Well-Being in Learning Environments

  1. personal development 
  2. flexibility 
  3. social connection
  4. positive classroom culture 
  5. civic engagement 
  6. instructor support 
  7. real-life learning
  8. supports and services 
  9. inclusivity 
  10. optimal challenge

MySSP Project

About the Project 

MySSP was implemented to fundamentally improve how mental health is perceived and how mental health services are offered at SFU. The project team wanted to foster a caring and supportive community, as well as facilitate an earlier student connection with mental health supports, and broadly minimize risk. Providing various justin-time support opportunities creates feelings of safety and a positive culture to enhance well-being.

Key Successes

  • Access to MySSP for each student (no opt-out option), with support 24/7 via multiple platforms—phone, chat, app, web access, etc
  • MySSP is now included as a standard messaging component from SFU communicators to students following any incident impacting student mental health or perceptions of safety.
  • Program usage for the first year (August 2018 – August 2019) exceeded targets by 159 per cent, including 2,390 new clinical cases.
  • More than 120 education sessions about MySSP were delivered and crisis supports were offered to faculty, staff, students.
  • 74 per cent of clinical cases, from August 2018 – August 2019, were supported after hours and on weekends, outside the regular operating hours of Health and Counselling Services

Roadmap

Semesterly newsletters to a network of more than 260 instructors and staff for supporting conditions, such as personal development, inclusivity, flexibility, and civic engagement within the learning environment.

Eight projects to improve well-being in learning environments and measure their impact on students. This faculty-led investigation of innovative teaching practices is part of the integrated seminar and grants program, in collaboration with the Institute for the Study of Teaching and Learning in the Disciplines.

Implement faculty specific events and other channels for increasing faculty engagement.