Small campus interventions — like adding hydration stations and making healthy foods more visible — can make a big difference in how students, faculty, and staff feel about well-being at their college, according to a new study.
Conducted at the University of California at Riverside, the study examined how health factors into university policy and how health-promotion programs contribute to campus culture. UC-Riverside is part of the Healthy Campus Network, an alliance of the UC system’s 10 institutions that’s focused on improving physical and mental health on each campus.
Eighteen focus groups of UC-Riverside students, faculty, and staff participated in the study in 2018, 2019, and 2020. As part of the research, Healthy Campus created some new health interventions and sought to raise awareness of existing efforts.
Participants were increasingly aware of health-promotion efforts on campus as the study progressed, according to the focus groups. In the last two years of the study, participants talked more about broader, institutionwide health policies, rather than specific programs.
Faculty and staff reported feeling left out of campus health services, researchers said. They could name many resources available to students, like the food pantry and recreation center, but they were unaware of what was available to employees. Those perceptions improved by the end of the study.
“There was this lack of, I would say, care about this other population of communities that exist on campus,” said Evelyn Vázquez, one of the authors of the paper. Vázquez is an assistant researcher in the department of social medicine, population, and public health at UC-Riverside’s School of Medicine.
Julie Chobdee, another one of the authors, said the infrastructure built as a part of the Healthy Campus project made them a hub for faculty and staff wellness on campus. Chobdee is now associate director of the employee health and well-being program at the University of Southern California’s WorkWell Center.
Additionally, first-generation students were sharing their increased knowledge of health services with their families, helping them to access mental-health care and more, Vázquez said.
The study also found that small environmental changes, like refurbishing stairwells and putting up nonsmoking signage, improved people’s perceptions of how committed their university was to health promotion.
One staff member praised stairwell improvements like better lighting and fresh paint, as well as signs encouraging people to take the stairs instead of the elevator. And even if someone needed to take the elevator on a given day, the staff member said, there were posters offering brief instructions on deep breathing.
Two staff members said their offices had added wellness activities into their training programs, citing that integration as evidence of a top-down commitment to better health. Walking meetings were also identified as a positive step.
Seeing campus leaders participate in health-promotion activities demonstrated that well-being was a genuine priority for the university, according to those interviewed.
Faculty members, meanwhile, could help students by doing something as simple as providing a link to mental-health services, said Ann Marie Cheney, another author of the paper and lead designer of the study.
Cheney, an associate professor in the department of social medicine, population, and public health at Riverside’s medical school, said her research made clear that students viewed faculty as access points for other services on campus, even if faculty did not consider the well-being of students as part of their role.
Cheney and Chobdee were formerly co-leaders of Healthy Campus at UC-Riverside, which involved nine subcommittees of students, faculty, and staff, overseen by a large advisory board. Chobdee hopes to build a similar program in her role at USC. Cheney and Vázquez have both transitioned out of the project.
Despite the positive findings from the study, Healthy Campus is in a period of flux, Cheney said. UC leaders have not been able to find a new crop of people who have a strong vision for the project and can bring together campus stakeholders, she said.
Cheney said more investment from university leadership would have helped the team plan a sustainable future. When she was involved, it was volunteer work, she said. She hopes the study can “spark a light” and garner more attention from the university’s administration.
Overall, the study shows that empowerment is key to creating a healthy campus community, Cheney said.
“Why I think Healthy Campus was so successful at our university is because we identified grass-roots leaders who were interested in creating healthier environments, and we supported their ideas,” she said.
