Counseling and Mental Health Service Chief Barbara Lewis said in an interview that wait times have fallen for students seeking mental health care.
“The fact is that you can be seen in CAMHS pretty quickly now,” said Lewis, who spoke to The Crimson last Wednesday alongside Harvard University Health Services Director Giang T. Nguyen.
The change comes after CAMHS hired additional staff focused on mental health and partnered with TimelyCare, a telehealth counseling program. It follows long-standing student complaints about lengthy wait times to schedule a mental health counseling visit through HUHS.
Lewis said CAMHS has met its goal of hiring six access coordinators in the past academic year. The coordinators will conduct initial consultations with students, which can be scheduled through the HUHS portal or over the phone.
“Our hope for this was that we would shorten the wait time for students to come in, and we’ve been actually quite successful with that so far,” Lewis said.
TimelyCare, which HUHS began partnering with in October 2022, has seen 6,418 telehealth visits from 2,785 students as of the end of September. Initial consultations with access coordinators can be scheduled on the same day, and virtual telehealth appointments have a wait of just two to three days.
Lewis, however, acknowledged that it takes longer to schedule an appointment to see a therapist, with students facing a seven to eight day wait time.
The new access coordinators have conducted nearly 800 initial consultations across just August and September, according to Lewis.
During the interview, Lewis also highlighted the breadth of resources available, including affinity groups, health workshops, unlimited health coaching, guided meditation, and a community support forum.
“We want to make sure that we have, in an ongoing way, availability for students,” Lewis said.
Lewis estimated that CAMHS is currently running at around 70 percent capacity while awaiting new hires, the last of whom will…
Read the full article here