Center for Student Health and Life

Overview of Results

Purpose and Methodology

The Center for Student Health and Life (CSHAL) survey on improving student health and wellness was conducted from December 24, 2007 through January 6, 2008. The web-based tool SurveyMonkey was used to construct the survey’s 15 questions and gather the responses.

Invitations to participate in the survey were distributed to current college students at 31 colleges and universities through advertisements on the social-networking site Facebook. Five hundred and five (505) students responded to the survey.

The 31 schools represent a cross-section of public and private institutions of different sizes from geographic regions around the country. A full list of the schools can be found in the demographic section below. A link to the survey instrument itself can be found at the end of the analysis.

The primary purpose of this survey of college students was to identify issues, trends and opportunities that will help CSHAL better tailor its efforts to improve student health and life going forward. We hope that colleges and universities will also analyze the results in their own efforts to better serve student health and wellness needs. The survey was designed to achieve the following goals:

• Understanding how and why students interact with their health center;
• Identifying new approaches and technologies that students themselves feel would improve this interaction; and,
• Hearing from students about their own perspectives on the health and wellness issues they face today.

Visiting the Health Center, Recreation Center, and Seeking Counseling: Frequency and Reasons

More than 55% of students surveyed had visited the health center in the last year between one and three times, and 65% had been there between one and six times. Roughly 6% had been to their health center more than seven times in the last year. About 75% of students surveyed had been to their health center at some point during their college years. Broken down by gender, more than 80% of the total female respondents and 64.2% of total male respondents had visited the student health center.

Going to the recreation center or gym was a popular activity, with more than half of students going there more than ten times in the last year. However, a fairly large minority of students, 20%, did not visit the recreation center at all during this period, and one-third of all respondents had visited their recreation center three times or less in the last year.

Why did students visit the student health center and/or counseling center? The chart below reflects the top reasons selected by students.

Please note that students were asked to choose all the reasons that applied for their various visits to the health center.

Interestingly, a somewhat higher percentage of seniors than other class years visited the health center or counseling office due to concerns about anxiety, depression and sexual health/STD screening. While further research is needed to understand the reasons for this trend, a greater awareness of student health center or counseling office services (and perhaps comfort level), concerns about “life after college” and increased sexual activity at older college ages are possible causes.

Communicating and Interacting with the Health Center: Practices and Preferences

A. Immunizations and Insurance

The survey asked students about how they communicated and interacted with the health center on a number of fronts.

A large percentage (32.9%) of students did not know how they or their parents confirmed with the school that their immunization records were up-to-date. The largest percentage, 35.4%, mailed their immunization records to the school, while 15.6% faxed theirs in. Interestingly, only 4.6% said they filled in a presumably more convenient online form.

More than half of respondents indicated that they had used health insurance when they visited the student health center. More than one-fifth indicated that they did not know whether insurance had been used, and about the same number indicated that they did not use health insurance of some kind when visiting their health center. The large number not knowing whether they used insurance indicates some confusion and suggests that more education may be needed to inform students about their health insurance options and the current practices of their health centers in this area.

B. Today’s Methods and Preferences for Making Appointments

Calling from a cell phone (48.5%) was the most common way students had set up appointments with their health center, trailed closely by “walking in” at 46.3%. Demonstrating that technology has not been fully embraced by health centers, only .2% of students said they had e-mailed an appointment request, with only 1% saying they had made an appointment using a health center website.

When asked how they would like to be able to schedule an appointment, students still like the option of calling from a cell phone, with 39% giving this their top preference on a scale of five.

Interestingly, about 32% chose as their first choice the ability to make an online appointment (akin to online airline scheduling). Even more dramatically, 80% of students chose making an online appointment as either their first, second or third choice, running just slightly behind the ability to call from their cell phone. Only 18.3% of students chose “email” as their first or second choice for making an appointment (compared to about 68% for the cell phone, and almost 60% for making an appointment online).

How would students like the health center to communicate with them?

Many students like the idea of the health center communicating with them via cell phone (90.5% chose this as their first or second choice on a scale of four). E-mailing was also very popular, with more than 70% selecting this choice as either their #1 or #2 preference for how they want the health center to communicate with them.

Students appear to feel fairly comfortable in having the health center communicate with them via e-mail, but are not wild about using that option when they contact the health center for an appointment, at least in the context of the other possible choices they were given (see above). Perhaps this apparent incongruity also has to do with the students’ confidence level about if and when the health center would respond to their e-mail messages.

Despite students’ seeming addiction to popular sites such as Facebook and their propensity to do text-messaging, they don’t appear to want to deal with entities outside of their social networks through these methods. Only 13.5% selected as their first or second choice for the health center to communicate with them using Facebook, and 25% chose text-messaging as a top two preferred method.

Student Views on their own Health and Wellness

When asked how they were doing on a number of topics, students indicated that they felt they were doing well as far as relationships, with 57.7% indicating they were either doing “very well” or “well.” A majority felt they did not have any major problems overall with “medical conditions,” with 64.4% saying they were doing “very well” or “well.” A good percentage of students, 40.5%, felt that they were doing either “very well” or “well” in terms of exercise (although one-third felt they were doing either “poor” or “very poor” on this front, a cause for concern). They also tend to feel well-educated on health matters, with 61.1% indicating they were doing “well” or “very well.”

Where did students feel they were not doing so well? More than one-quarter of respondents (27.5%) felt they were doing either “poor” or “very poor” in managing stress. A large minority of students, about a third, also felt they were doing either “poor” or “very poor” in exercising. Based on the overall good feelings expressed about relationships, the primary cause of the stress felt by students must be found elsewhere (grades, tests, future plans are among the possibilities). There appeared to be some correlation in the data between exercise and lower stress levels, but this needs to be explored further in future surveys.

In short, more research is needed to better analyze concerns on stress and exercise, and CSHAL plans to conduct several focus groups and conduct a follow-on survey specifically on these topics. Our goal is to develop a set of recommendations and an education plan to alleviate student stress and increase exercise.

Using New Technology for Student Healthcare

A majority of students (56%) liked the idea of storing their health records online, a trend that is just starting to emerge in healthcare generally. The primary reasons given were convenience and easier access.