According to Patti Collins, the health and wellness counselor at Northwestern University in Qatar, this year universities in EC are collaborating on health and wellness programs to not only spur greater involvement among students, but also to provide health education and other social awareness programs at a wider level.

“At the end of the day, we want to make sure our students learn the most and we help them achieve better experiences at university,” she said. “Collaboration made our efforts synergistic and we were able to incorporate a lot of innovative ideas from different people into one event.”

This year, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar and NU-Q collaborated on a domestic violence awareness event held on October 19. In addition these universities, along with Texas A&M University at Qatar and Hamad Bin Khalifa University, also organized the Health and Wellness Fair at CMU-Q held on September 28. The fair included 22 vendors focused on different health aspects, including physical health, mental health, nutrition, physical exercise and environmental health.

Amie Rollins, director of health and wellness at CMU-Q, said collaboration has improved the quality of events in EC. “I feel like we’re at an added advantage at being able to collaborate with other universities because there are so many staff members that you have to bounce your ideas off of and figure out which one’s best,” she added.

Student involvement in health and wellness programs

CMU-Q also recruits student volunteers as mentors and peer health advocates to increase peer-to-peer interactions among students. “Student mentors are for the first year students and it really helps when you have a mentor to go to when you’re struggling,” Rollins said.

The PHAs are a group of nine students who organize outreach programs that focus on the health and wellbeing of the whole student body. The CMU-Q health and wellness staff provides them with Question Persuade Refer (QPR) training, a program on suicide prevention, before the students can become PHAs.

“As a community, it is very important and valuable to have a friend to talk to when we need to,” said Layan Yousef Azam, a PHA and a junior at CMU-Q. The PHAs work on various programs, such as events promoting stress relief and informational sessions on eating healthy. Most recently they hosted a breakfast table series and served various breakfast treats to students to highlight quick and easy to prepare healthy eating options for students.

NU-Q also organizes anti-domestic violence, QPR, bystander intervention and self-defense training for students. Habibah Abass, a junior at NU-Q, said these student training opportunities have helped her to identify signs of when someone is being abused or struggling with depression.

“I think it’s really easy to say you support a cause and just think about it abstractly, but [these programs help] turn important issues into something we can all relate to in one way or another, which I think is really important in terms of building ourselves up as a caring community,” Abass said.

Bisma Munawar, a junior at CMU-Q agrees. “The Health and Wellness Fair was really informative and helpful, and I believe that going to counselors is very important because I feel like I’m dumping the stress out of my life and thinking rationally,” she said. “This week, I’ve been so sick and my mum is out of the country and health and wellness is what helped me get through this.”