Health care policy is no place to mess around, especially when it applies to 43,000 students’ access to mental health resources.
Effective this quarter, UCLA Counseling and Psychological Services, or CAPS, will reduce the number of appointments available to students with the University of California Student Health Insurance Plan by 40 percent, from 10 visits to six. As a short-term treatment center, CAPS should not be held responsible for providing long-term care to students, but its decisions should still be based on students’ needs on campus.
Instead, this decision to drastically reduce students’ number of free visits was not made in response to an assessment of how Bruins use CAPS – such a data analysis doesn’t exist – but based on a national survey of almost 500 schools – among which UCLA is not represented – that concluded students only avail of such facilities about six times per year.
Until it has some understanding of students’ needs, UCLA should abstain from making any changes to how CAPS functions without backing it up with concrete, relevant data. The center should immediately begin to analyze recent trends in how students use the facility so it is able to adjust its recent policy changes and continue to collect relevant data pertinent to how and why the student body’s demand changes for future adjustments.
There is a chance this statistic, as published by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors Annual Survey, might apply to our campus, but CAPS’ reduction is essentially a shot in the dark. A more appropriate internal investigation could reveal that UCLA students make use of mental health resources on campus much more or much less than the schools surveyed, indicating a different change may have been more effective.
Although Nicole Green, the interim executive director of CAPS, said UCLA students seem to use less than four sessions per year, the center is still waiting on more data to confirm whether this is true and if the plan they have already implemented is an efficient way to proceed. Historically, the number of free sessions CAPS offers per year has fluctuated frequently. In fall of 2012, the number of free sessions was increased to 12 but then was lowered in Winter 2013 to eight, in response to falling student demand.
Clearly, there is no concrete data as to what students at UCLA need when it comes to mental health resources and why the demand is constantly changing. Amending policies in a seemingly arbitrary manner when there is no relevant, clear-cut data to support a need for it and indicate what plan would be most successful is foolish.
Although the decision might have been made with the best of intent, given CAPS’ reputation as an understaffed and underfunded resource, the attempt to allocate resources most effectively and reduce long wait times students face between visits was not backed up by hard, stone-cold facts. Instead of changing the number of free sessions somewhat arbitrarily every so often, CAPS must understand why this fluctuation is happening and create a preemptive strategy of how to handle it.