Student Mental Health Same day counselling evaluation & data collection
To ensure timely access to mental health services, same day counselling is available to students on all three campuses. Data suggests there are only rare cases when students cannot book an appointment on the same or next day, if they want one. Same day counselling models have been widely adopted in post-secondary settings. However, before 2024, we did not know a lot about what was working best for students and wanted to better understand student experience using this counselling model.
Working with a Student Advisory Committee comprised of U of T students representing all three campuses, an evaluation framework was designed to assess same day counselling. Students helped select the measures used and re-worded items that needing modifying for the U of T context. They also picked the timeline for sending the follow up questionnaire and provided guidance on how to talk about the evaluation with other students.
Evaluation Measures
Evaluation measures included:
- A “thermometer” to assess in-the-moment levels of distress
- The K-6, a widely used, standardized measure of distress experienced in the last few weeks
- An item assessing whether students felt listened to by the counsellor
- An item assessing whether students left the session with next steps
- The “goal-based outcome” tool, an assessment of how far an individual has come to meeting their goals or addressing their problem since the counselling session.
This distress thermometer was used as part of the evaluation and data collection for same day counselling
Findings
More than 500 students provided data as part of the initial evaluation phase during July and August of 2024. There are five early findings from the evaluation:
- Distress scores measured using the thermometer decreased from before the session to after
- Students found the session helpful, with 77% indicating that it helped them develop next steps or gain new understanding about their problem
- Students felt listened to by the counsellor, scoring on average 2.6 on a scale from -3 to +3
- Distress remained significantly lower after 2 weeks, as indicated by K-6 scores that decreased from pre-session to the follow up survey
- Students made meaningful progress to achieving their goals as indicated using the goal-based outcome tool
Based on the early results of the evaluation, parts of the data collection with some modifications continues. For example, students continue to be asked to fill out a form before their session to indicate their goal and rate their distress in the last few weeks. They are also asked to use the thermometer before and after each session.
Continued data collection has demonstrated that:
- Distress appears consistently lower after the session, demonstrating the effectiveness of a single session
- Distress levels go up and down among those using same day counselling depending on the time of year, showing how stressors associated with the academic year affect students
Aligned with the goals of the Presidential and Provostial Task Force Report on Student Mental Health, this initiative represents an important step toward evaluating mental health interventions for post-secondary students. By providing these findings, we hope students can see for themselves the positive impact that same day, short-term intervention can have on mental health.
