Supporting health and wellbeing

Introduction

This award acknowledges the importance for both students and staff of balancing healthier lives and healthier working practices through building awareness of and strategies for wellbeing across organisations and practice.

Increasingly, across FHE contexts the challenges of workload demands are having a negative impact on the health of professionals and students. Students can find it challenging to structure and balance their study, social and working lives.

Staff may need to be informed about these: show consideration for and accommodate mental and wider health issues for students. Staff can feel overburdened and disempowered by what they see as increasing demands, less time and fewer resources, administrative changes and institutional priorities.

More widely, there is national concern about health due to increasing levels of obesity, alcohol, lack of exercise and stress. Such concerns often emerge in studies, surveys and national recommendations, but are often neglected as a factor in academic work.

This award acknowledges the importance for both students and staff of balancing healthier lives and healthier working practices through increased resilience, building awareness of and strategies for wellbeing. It also acknowledges the growing expectation that staff proactively plan, prioritise, determine and implement strategies, for developing their careers and managing work demands of, e.g. research, teaching and administration, and work life balance.

This award could be used to respond to the above as part of wider professional development. It can direct attention towards resilience, emotional intelligence, mindfulness, space and time management and other possible techniques for enhancing wellbeing and mental health, and wider health concerns in the academic setting. The award encourages dialogue, reflection and action around this issue for individuals and teams as an important component of the student HE/FE experience and academic practice.

Audience

Professional staff in institutions to raise awareness for themselves about health & well being.

This award can be variously targeted. It has been designed to offer a flexible award to encourage health and well being awareness across institutions for staff and students, therefore it can be used by managers, by academics and professional support services, and when considering the student HE experience and learning processes.

Values

Award recipients will have shown how their work is informed by the SEDA Values:

1. Developing understanding of how people learn
2. Practicing in ways that are scholarly, professional and ethical
3. Working with and developing learning communities
4. Valuing diversity and promoting inclusivity
5. Continually reflecting on practice to develop ourselves, others and processes.

Core development outcomes

Award recipients will be able to:

1. Identify their own professional development goals, directions or priorities
2. Plan for the initial and/or continuing professional development
3. Undertake appropriate development activities
4. Review their development and their practice, and the relations between them

Specialist outcomes

Additionally award recipients will be able to:

1. Identify and reflect on issues for health and wellbeing in their practice setting as a duty of care for him/herself as individual practitioner and/or for others (students and staff)
2. Inform themselves on appropriate approaches and techniques for supporting health and well being for themselves and/ or for others
3. Evaluate selected approaches (for the individual) and identify appropriate responses
4. Contribute to enhanced health and well being practices within their HE setting informed by appropriate ethical considerations

Named awards co-ordinators

Ruth Pilkington ruth.pilkington1@btinternet.com
Roisín Curran r.curran@ulster.ac.uk