In response to a high volume of missed mental health appointments at Student Health Services, the Health and Wellness Committee has launched a campaign to reduce the number of missed appointments.

The committee—which is comprised of undergraduate and graduate students, staff and faculty—has created a graphic which will be placed in table tents located on the tables in the Danforth University Center and Bear’s Den and displayed on televisions located throughout campus.

Currently, over 1,500 mental health appointments are missed this year without cancellation, which is the equivalent of Student Health Services (SHS) having 1.5 unused staffers. Each week, about 37 appointments are skipped. Through the campaign, the Health and Wellness Committee seeks to make students more aware of the impact missing a scheduled appointment has.

“Right now, if you try to get an appointment, there’s a ton of back up; it could even take two months to get an appointment, and a lot of that is because people sign up for appointments and don’t show up, and then people complain about not being able to get an appointment. We don’t want to place the blame on people, but we want to make people more aware of the impact of not showing up,” sophomore Lisa Gorham, a member of the the Health and Wellness Committee who worked to create the campaign, said.

“It’s always sad for us to see how many appointments don’t get utilized when they are missed,” Jennifer Self, the assistant director of mental health services and the campaign’s supervisor, added. “It’s really for the students that we want to reduce this number of missed appointments because we want to get more students in.”

The ultimate goal for the campaign is to increase the availability of appointment slots by getting students to officially cancel appointments rather than not showing up for them, which can be done either online or by calling SHS.

“We’re not trying to ask that much of people, but we hope that it’ll make a big difference,” Gorham said.

While the Health and Wellness Committee is comprised of both students and Washington University employees, Self noted the importance of students in getting the campaign off the ground and hopes interested students will reach out to her with ideas to improve the project or to get involved.

SHS also hopes to solicit feedback from students throughout the campaign, both in order to increase awareness about how many appointments go unused and to actively engage students with the project.

“Students have really been the backbone of the project,” Self said. “We really found that our projects are more successful if we have students involved from the ground up.”

The campaign will roll out this semester, and the full campaign will go into effect in the fall. SHS hopes to continue the campaign until the number of missed mental health appointments is reduced.

“We’ll probably run the campaign as long as we have the issue, so for now until the unforeseeable future, I will continue to supervise or whoever is in my position as assistant director of mental health services would oversee the project and continue to solicit student input,” Self said.

Additional reporting by Danielle Drake-Flam