How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
According to a recent WSN survey, the Wellness Exchange isn't all its billed up to be. A 24-hour emergency hotline, the Wellness Exchange serves as a portal to reach health services, assisting students in issues that range from mental health to sexual assault. After normal business hours, the calls are outsourced. The program was launched three years ago after a slew of on-campus suicides.
The hotline is well-promoted, with a stage production devoted to pointing students "in the right direction" and campus flyers encouraging its use. In a recent WSN survey, however, a number of students have described the hotline as ineffective. Long waits, slow support and "unhelpful" counselors have discouraged students from using the resource, forcing us to consider the ethicality of the program's advertising campaign, which portrays immediate, competent assistance available 24 hours a day.
We do not attribute the said ineffectiveness of the Wellness Exchange to understaffing, per se. Instead, we feel that the program has simply spread itself too thin. The Wellness Exchange seeks to address issues ranging from LGBT concerns to legal counseling for sexual assault victims. Some of these are immediate, pressing issues - suicide comes to mind - and cannot be subjected to 10-minute holds. It is unacceptable.
The Wellness Exchange emphasizes that in a medical emergency, such as alcohol poisoning, students should call 911.
The service is designed as a portal in addition to a counseling hotline. Taking student complaints into account, we feel that administrators are faced with a choice between being a sluggish portal or an effective counseling hotline - the Wellness Exchange can't be both.
We do not have enough detailed information about the Wellness Exchange's performance to start speculating about solutions. Considering this information shortage and increasing student complaints, we urge NYU to mount a large-scale investigation to assess the program's effectiveness.
Maintaining an all-purpose hotline from which a variety of issues can be confronted is a fine idea. Judging by the concerns voiced in the WSN survey, however, this type of program hasn't translated into an effective counseling service. In lieu of more detailed information on Wellness Exchange effectiveness - something that hopefully won't be long in coming - we think the program's dual roles as hotline and counseling service need to be reassessed and streamlined.
