Student Health Service

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30939, 21 December 1965, Page 20

Student Health Service

The extensions to be made next year to the student health service of the University of Canterbury should go a long way towards ensuring that illness does not interrupt studies and that studies do not cause illness. Medical Interviews for all first-year students will at least acquaint those entering the university of the help available to them; they will also help to ensure the early detection of weaknesses and enable them to be treated promptly, either by the service or by the students’ own doctors. Interviews, not examinations, are proposed; and what use the student makes of the advice offered is a matter for his own decision. The increasing numbers of students who have used the service voluntarily suggests that the value of the service is now widely recognised. Medical interviews for all new students, annual interviews for others, the availability of the full service to students of the Christchurch Teachers* College, and the opening of a full-time clinic at Dam in addition to the one on the central site are improvements which will serve a very large community of young people. This medical oversight will be appreciated particularly by parents of students living away from home. The forthcoming appointment of a third doctor, trained in psychiatry, is especially welcome in view of the report that of 5000 consultations 13.5 per cent were for mental health reasons. University study to-day is exacting, imposing both physical and emotional strains. Social reasons and the high cost of university education alike require that unnecessary causes of student failure should be removed. In its new preventive programme the student health service seeks to ensure that illness is not a cause of failure.