UMHAN April 2024 Newsletter
UMHAN (University Mental Health Advisers Network)
We are the largest network of mental health professionals working in education, established in 2003.
Welcome to our April newsletter! We hope you enjoyed some restful time off over the Easter vacation. We know this is a very busy time for lots of you, so please remember to look after yourselves as well as the students!
UMHAN news
Mental Health in Education Awards
We delighted to announce the launch of our new Mental Health in Education awards. The awards?aim to?celebrate,?inspire and promote excellence. Launched as part of our work to commemorate our?20th anniversary, we aim to make them inclusive of all members, in any role and at any stage of their career.
We invite colleagues, line managers, senior managers, collaborators, partners and students to take this opportunity to recognise outstanding practice in a number of categories.
Key dates
To make the awards a success we need your nominations! Please go to the weblink for more details about each category, and a link to the form. Please share widely amongst your networks, and with students as you are able!
UMHD
We had a great day on Uni Mental Health Day, despite having technical issues for our webinar. There were some fantastic events both on campus, online and elsewhere -??from the University of Sunderland's "elephant in the room" (someone actually dressed up as an elephant!) to Instagram awareness raising posts.?
If you took part in Uni Mental Health Day in any way, the UMHD team would?love to have your feedback. Please complete the short form:?
You can access a recording of our webinar "When does anxiety become a problem"?here:
Disabled Students Allowances - call for evidence
Last week we were given notice that the Department of Education have opened a call for evidence around "Improving non-medical help for disabled students in higher education". Not surprisingly there is mention of "value for money", and the idea that better inclusive practice and evolving forms of support by universities might negate the need for some Non-Medical Help (NMH) support.?
This is the specific passage about mental health:?"As an example, one area of significant change has been for students with a mental?health condition, where HEPs have been evolving their wellbeing services over recent?years. Research published in May 2023 found that 86% provided in-house self-help?resources and 83% offered in-house psychological support for those experiencing poor?mental health, either face-to-face or virtual contact with a counsellor. 85% had early?warning systems in place for mental health difficulties.
These services are a different?type of provision from DSA-funded support for students with mental health conditions.?As DSA cannot fund disability-related expenditure that the student would incur even if?they were not attending an HE course, it cannot fund the management or treatment of amental health condition, and the DSA-funded Specialist Mentor – Mental Health NMH?role therefore focuses specifically on enabling students to access their academic?studies. However, it is relevant to consider the interaction between the two types of?support now that mental health support at HEPs has become so much more widely?available."?
Over the past few years, we have been lobbying both the Student Loans Company and Department of Education to focus on ensuring NMH support is good quality, along with other sector organisations. We know there is room for improvement. However, we are immediately concerned that this will lead to a reduction in support for students with mental health conditions, and all Disabled students.
We will be meeting with our sector colleagues to discuss potential implications and providing UMHAN members with opportunities to feed into our formal response.
You can read the detail, and submit your own evidence here:
Get involved
Research collaboration guidelines
We often get approached about getting involved in research and recently published some guidelines to help researchers and the UMHAN team evaluate whether a collaboration is worthwhile.
We ask researchers to complete a short form with?a number of questions to enable us to assess whether research aligns with our aims, vision, and its relevance to our membership.?
For more information on collaboration, see our webpage:
*Please note that due to the nature of our work, and that of our members, we can not help with general requests to promote participation from students.
Research participation
Someone who did complete our form was Dr Cassie Hazell from 英国萨里大学 . She is undertaking some research she'd like your help with.
Who is responsible for making our universities suicide safe? Every year a significant number of university students die by suicide. Our project?team are interested in learning more about what the role of universities and the staff?working within them is in preventing student suicide and supporting suicidal students.
We have a plan for a research study to look into this issue – but we want to make?sure it meets the needs of those that would be impacted by this research. The?groups of people that we would like to speak to separately are:
1. Students with experience of mental health difficulties.
2. Adults with experience of feeling suicidal.
3. Bereaved friends and family that have lost a loved one to suicide while that person was a student.
4. University staff who have experience of supporting a suicidal student.
If you identify with any of these target groups, we would like to invite you to take part in one of our two-hour online workshops where we will present some of our ideas.
We would like you to give feedback and critique our ideas so that we can develop the project ideas. You would be reimbursed ￡50 for attending the workshop. There will also be an opportunity for a subgroup of attendees to attend a second workshop to hear and reflect on the feedback from other stakeholder groups, and also to continue to work with us to produce an animated video outlining the key feedback from the workshops.
If you are interested in finding out more about these workshops, please register your interest here .
Sam Gamblin
Charity Manager