October 27, 2014, by studentcontributor
Welfare – who supports students?
Hi everyone, Hannah again. I’m writing in my role as Student Voice rep this week to tell you all about welfare things here at Nottingham. Hopefully it will be useful for both potential students and current students 🙂
Welfare here is organised both by students and the medical school/university. Medical students can obviously access all of the same services as other students which includes the Student Advice Centre, the Health Service (based at Cripps Health Centre) and the University Counselling Service. These are based on campus however so not always the easiest to access for medics, although they do offer phone- and email- based help. There’s also a University student run service called Nightline where you can talk anonymously to an advisor. This runs more around stressful times, for example exam times, and also has an online sector.
Personal tutors
There are also some medic specific services, which are often easier to access. All students are allocated a personal tutor from day 1 and these are often the first port of call. They are there for both pastoral and academic queries and issues, as well as often being your reference for your F1 job! If you don’t feel like you can go to your tutor, there are also lots of very friendly senior tutors you can chat to.
Peer mentoring schemes
If you’d rather talk to someone on your level then there are also two peer mentoring schemes. At the moment the medical school system is for trained second years to mentor first years and the MedSoc scheme is open to all however it’s hoped that both will eventually be for everyone. There is also the Medic Family system which leads to all students having a medic parent in the year above.
Support request
Finally, if none of these avenues are quite right for your situation then you can submit a Request for Support form for yourself or another student. This will mean that the student will get the right support for whatever is going on.
If you want any more information about any of these then please check out the links below. You can also come to our Student Support Event which will happening at the end of November to launch the new welfare area near the course office. It’s also an opportunity to meet staff members from the medical school and put a face to the emails!
Links
http://www.su.nottingham.ac.uk/healthcare/medsoc/welfare/
MZ-iscchair@nottingham.ac.uk
www.su.nottingham.ac.uk
Nightline don’t have advisors! The service is completely non-advisory so trained listening volunteers are there to speak through anything that might be worrying someone or just for a chat!
Also, the online instant messaging service (www.nottinghamnightline.co.uk/instant-messaging ) is open every night of term, just like their phone service, not just during exam time
All the information can be found on their facebook page or website so definitely check that out! facebook.com/nottinghamnightline or nottinghamnightline.co.uk