Personalising support for Nursing & Midwifery students by implementing a new Faculty Student Support Manager role

Emily Coutts (King's College London)
Lynne Wainwright (King's College London)

Monday, April 7, 2025 4:00 PM - 4:45 PM

POSITIVE EMOTION

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Session Outline

The creation of a new, faculty-based, Student Support Manager (SSM) role has enabled us to personalise a centralised university’s mental health support offer for Nursing & Midwifery students. In this presentation we explore the impact of this intervention on healthcare students and faculty Personal Tutors, Cohort Leads and Programme Leads.

King’s College London is a complex organisation serving over 45,000 students in multiple campuses across London. Student nurses and midwives are demographic outliers both at King’s and amongst other Russell Group university cohorts: our faculty has the highest proportion of WP students of any at King’s, the lowest academic entry requirements, and a high proportion of students facing multiple and intersecting needs. Our degrees involve 50% practice-based learning, which can lead to our students feeling isolated in terms of geography as well as their sense of belonging at King’s, where the majority have a very different student experience. Against this context, students are at high risk of disengagement, interruption and withdrawal.

Sitting in the faculty’s Student Experience Team, the SSM mitigates this by meeting students and academic colleagues where they are, facilitating faculty-based relationships which then serve as a gateway to centrally-located mental health support services. The SSM works one-to-one with students to ensure their mental health needs are met on placement, working with OH providers and NHS Trust partners to ensure reasonable adjustments are made. They signpost students to the correct level of support or safeguarding within central services. This removes barriers to access amongst a cohort that can struggle to navigate complex internal referral systems.

The NESET report on Student and staff mental wellbeing in European higher-education institutions (2024) highlights the interrelatedness of staff and student mental health in HEIs. Colleagues’ own mental health is often impacted by working with students who have complex needs, so the SSM functions as a mental health consultant for academic staff who, like their students, can feel culturally and geographically isolated from central support services. Safeguarding carries an additional layer of responsibility in our context as we must prioritise patient safety, as well as students’ levels of risk, in decision-making. Our PTS, like those surveyed in the recent WonkHE round table of Academic Personal Tutors, actively request guidance on maintaining boundaries, understanding what support is available centrally and where their safeguarding duties lie. The creation of the SSM role has brought mental health guidance to academic colleagues, and the students they support, within the faculty community.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of the presentation, attendees will know the impact faculty-based mental health support can have on both student and staff wellbeing, specifically within a healthcare faculty context

Bibliography

https://wonkhe.com/blogs/what-academics-want-from-academic-support/

https://nesetweb.eu/en/resources/library/student-and-staff-mental-well-being-in-european-higher-education-institutions/

Competencies
This session addresses the following competencies of the UKAT Professional Framework for Advising and Tutoring