Guelph-Care aims to reduce these stresses in students lives, and make the overall mental and physical health care systems on campus more accessible and fair for all. My first major media group project was heavily concerned with the current state of Mental and Physical health institutes on campus. We began the development process of the issue we wanted to focus on The project currently involves a facebook page, and our proposal which outlines the issues we have with the current state of health care; as well as the things which we believe would bring solutions to these issues.
We begin the proposal by outlining some problems regarding the mental health counsellor facilities available, “having to wait very long periods of time before being able to speak to a counsellor, and relating our current mental health services as being similar to “speed-dating” due to the limited number of counsellors employed at the school who are expected to counsel a far larger number of students who are in need.” (Guelph-Care) shining the light on key issues with the current state of mental health counselling. While the student in need is undergoing a ‘crisis’ these long wait times can be extremely counterproductive, including the reality that the counsellor which you could get assigned might be somebody which you’ve never previously spoken to; it isn’t effective in helping those students.
Another issue which our proposal poses regards general health-care facilities on campus and the issues which they bring students. We point out in our proposal “Students go without any health-care insurance for the first 6 weeks of classes, and are required to pay very expensive late fees for being late to appointments on campus.”(Guelph-care), further pointing out that this is also ridiculously counter-productive and is only harming the students financially; which are already paying large sums to be on campus and have access to these facilities.
Our solution begins with significantly raising the awareness of these issues, since in the current reality, these issues are not noticeable until they affect you directly. Our goal is to no longer have these issues impact anybody on campus. We point out in our solutions “ Through the use of media outlets such as Facebook, we hope to share the statistics and information surrounding our current health care systems with the public in order to create this awareness and employ the help of other students in standing with us to make change on campus”(Guelph Care). We have created a facebook page which the posts will be outlining these issues, the idea is that enough students speaking out regarding these issues will spark the change necessary. The next step would be regarding specific staff who we could speak to in order to get certain fixes in place, negotiation would be our overall goal and the student body would be our leverage.