Student health services: how educational?

Abstract

STUDENT Health Services are by now established as necessary features of British universities and they are likely to become increasingly common in our other in stitutions of higher education also. The influential rationale for such special provision (as presented e.g. by Mal leson, 1964; Ryle, 1969; Gunn, 1970; Cauthery, 1974) may be outlined briefly. For economic, humanitarian and educational reasons, stu dents' health problems as well as their academic ones have to be identified and met. But because of the particular institutional context in which students operate, the prob lems, their causes and their effects are in large part peculiar to students as stu dents. In consequence they are inadequately met by social services available to the general public and are best met directly via institution- ally provided services. Matters do not end simply with the provision of readily accessible and specialised pri mary and secondary health services, however. In the first place there seems among the advocates of such provision to be a general acceptance of the view expressed by Mair (1967) that because the con cepts of 'health' and 'welfare' are interdependent, the con cerns of student health ser vices extend into the 'phy sical, mental, moral and spiritual aspects of student life.' Secondly, and connected with this, there is the view that because they exist in the context and under the aus pices of educational institu tions, student health services are not simply adjuncts but are integral to the whole educational enterprise. This being so, then although stu dent health professionals readily count 'Preventive Medicine and Health Educa tion' among their primary tasks (Scott, 1974), their 'educative functions' may be more extensive and contro versial than they at first appear. This paper reports recent research findings which throw some new light upon this issue.