For the care and wellness of students and faculty, Paula Staight has been working with Shannon Mulligan, Marci Torres and Lauri Woodward to bring the new Health Wellness Center to students and faculty.
The Health Wellness Center is a part of the plans for the new EMU, which will be a collaborative space where multiple groups and organizations can come and provide resources for students.
These resources include offering meditation classes, yoga, ways to relieve stress, group acupuncture, a travel clinic that can offer flu shots during flu season, academic advising and a new central location for student peer health advisors.
Changes may occur, but these are some of the ideas that Staight has come up with.
The Health Wellness Center is an independently run hub that pulls away from the UO Health Center. The Health Center focuses more on providing health and medical care services for students, where as the wellness center will focus on the well-being of students and staff.
The name for the Health Wellness Center is still under consideration.
Staight sees the space as a great option to bring health and wellness away from the regular setting of a health clinic.
“It’s a way of bringing health outside of the clinic setting,” Staight said.
Staight worked with Shannon Millington, a physical trainer manager for sports medicine, and Marci Torres, who was the director for the Healthy Campus Initiative — who is now working at Montana State University. All of them collaborated to create a proposal for the center.
Staight will use the American College Health Association National College Health Assessment to influence the activities the university will offer students and staff. The assessment is a survey distributed to over 5,000 random students on campus to see what issues affect students such as stress, study skills, wellness, well-being and so on.
By doing this, Staight is getting a general idea of what issues affect students. She will then be able to implement supplies to students that will help resolve those issues.
“I want it to be a collaborative space,” Staight said. “I want it to be where all of the departments are in student affairs, for example, have the opportunity to weigh-in on the development of the space and the opportunity to participate in keeping it vital.”
UO Health Center Operations Manager Shannon Millington states that students at UO reveal that stress is the leading barrier to being successful at school. Even though there is no concrete area on campus that helps with the decrease of this, having the wellness center will allow students to have that option and help with the reduction of stress.
“The creation of a wellness center in the EMU would allow the University Health center to work with campus partners to create such a space,” Millington said. “Our vision is to offer multi-modal services to the UO community that help with stress reduction and overall wellness.”
Health Promotions Specialist Renee Mulligan believes that with the wellness center, staff members will be able to reach out to students who only go to the UO Health Center for purposes relating to sickness. The wellness center will be able to provide amenities to students that not only relate to health, but their well-being.