Students at the University of Michigan know the facts of healthy living, but, let's face it, the pressures of academic life and peer influences tend to erode good health behaviors.
Unlike other adult situations in which health promotion programs attempt to reverse poor health behaviors,
Wolverine Wellness tries to prevent bad habits from taking root by teaching its student clients the resilience they'll need to endure academic life. In some cases, it requires coaching. In other cases therapy and support programs.
Mary Jo Desprez, director of Wolverine Wellness, says the integration of services comes at a time when the
University Health Service is considering physical consolidation of health resources and E. Royster Harper, U-M Vice President for Student Affairs, has articulated a holistic philosophy of educating students.
Last fall, Harper announced a realignment of functions to incorporate a campus-wide emphasis on health and wellness, guided by a
collective impact model.
"We have to start philosophically looking at students more holistically, while we move to create facilities and services that are more holistic," Deprez says. Health promotion services had previously operated as "silos," programmatically and geographically. Now they’re integrated within the Wolverine Wellness identity, and staff are identified simply as "health educators."
"We’ve already seen multiple, mutually-reinforcing activities by getting all of us in the same room," she says. "Wellness coaching" is one way in which the program creates a virtual sense of facility and program integration. "This is something in which we didn’t have to wait for a building to be built. We said we’re going to be proactive and not wait until someone is referred to us for a problem."
Wellness coaching, which has elements of personal fitness or employee health counseling, has been around for awhile, but there wasn’t an application for student life.
"We had to do some digging," says Joy Pehlke, M.Ed., health educator and wellness coach. "There are maybe 10 other institutions that are doing it in a way that is semi-robust."
"Coach" and "goals," resonate in a success-driven, athletic culture like the University of Michigan. The athletic motif was a draw for one of the program's first clients, Deprez says. "For him, that was enough of a suggestion that it wasn’t going to be 'therapy,' so we weren’t stigmatizing him. And that it was certainly an expression that he was goal-oriented, which is not unlike many U-M students."
In addition to her experience as an educator, Pehlke is also an athletic coach. "The combination of the two was my interest: college health (and) coaching versus therapy." Therapy, she says, "is more like you’re listening to someone. You’re not necessarily providing tips. In a coaching relationship someone is actually asking for some guidance. We’re still giving the control to them."
People will initiate a wellness coaching relationship because, "something has gone wrong," Pehlke says. Coaching isn’t as simple as a health risk assessment, but it does involve an analysis of the problem and a prescription for behavioral change.
"It could me someone who wants to lose weight," Pehlke says. "It could mean someone who is having family trouble; they don’t know how they can persist in academics. I had an international student who was having a hard time integrating in her graduate program. I had another student who had body image issues in addition to other stuff going on."
The wellness coach then develops a corrective plan as any coach would work with an individual player or team unit.
"For us that means coming from a positive psychology approach, which is help students navigate through what might be going on, but also to prep them to go back out into the world and deal with life itself; giving them resilience skills around coping; how they can build on their strengths to make their situation better or avoid something in the future."
The critical value of Wolverine Wellness is not to respond to need, but to address it at an early stage.
"If you’re feeling just a little off, we can be a resource," Desprez says. The university has abundance health and human service resources, but with 43,000 students the likelihood of alienated, troubled students remains significant. "We have students out there sitting alone in a room not knowing where to go for help. It is heartbreaking."
Students need to recognize when something is "a little off," and inquire as to how personal coaching may help address it. The wellness coach "helps make the connection; that help-seeking in this arena of your life is just as legitimate as help seeking in financial management."
The idea that you can recognize when you’re out of sorts before you’re in crisis," came as a surprise to Desprez, whose expertise likes in human resources training. "To me that is the sweet spot of this particular idea. It is preventative."
Wellness coaching involves two or three sessions. Once goals are set, there may be subsequent "check-ups," but generally, students are on their own. Sometimes coaching leads to a psychotherapy for students with complex problems.
"We have red flags we’re looking for, like suicide, assault," Deprez says.
"Our best coaching is to coach them into a long-term therapeutic resource." Pehlke adds, "I’ve had one student who did both: went to see their therapist and continued to see me as a wellness coach because he found those to be different but both helpful."
With fewer than 20 clients, the wellness coaching component isn’t yet at a point of evaluation, Deprez says. However, pre-and post-assessments are being conducted, examining factors such as resilience, coping skills, understanding of the wellness dimension, awareness and access to resources, values and how they intersect with student well being, among other factors. Results are expected later in 2014.
Other Wolverine Wellness initiatives are being developed, such as the app
Stressbusters, for use on campus.
"The cool thing about it is that they cross promote other wellness activities on campus," Deprez says. Wolverine Wellness will eventually include a larger group programs and seminars and social media engagement.
Beyond program efficiencies and population health management, Wolverine Wellness is a symbol of university values and the critical need to graduate healthy students.
"I got into this work because I believe in the power of a college education and college students," Desprez says. "I have been able to see first-hand that health behavior choices can disrupt a person’s ability to fulfill that potential. It is a privilege to go to college. It is a privilege to work with college students at a point in their life when they’re trying to decide what their unique gifts and talents are. And it’s heartbreaking to see how health behaviors take them off course. The world has huge problems. We need these college students to go help us. If they get addicted, get assaulted, get disease, it will lower their capacity to do that."
Dennis Archambault is a freelance writer and regular contributor to Concentrate and Metromode.