Response from SUND to the column ‘WANTED: Common sense at SUND’

By Merete Munk, Head of Education at the Faculty of Health Sciences, 5/29/2024

The reason is that the need for counselling is expected to increase, the rules and regulations surrounding education are complex and the consequences of inappropriate or incorrect counselling are significant. We are looking into a time of increased focus on further and continuing education, and this means a new group of students with different counselling needs that we must also be able to meet. Finally, we must always make sure that the resources used on education-related activities are spent as prudently as possible.

To continue to ensure good and reliable counselling for all students, we at SUND have decided to organise our counselling efforts in a new way. We see the same development at other faculties at SDU and at other health science faculties in Denmark.

SUND is changing its counselling organisation from consisting solely of programme-specific, student counsellors to a hybrid comprising student counsellors and a professional, permanent and trained counsellor. We are doing this to:

• ensure a higher degree of consistency and quality in our counselling so that we always provide SUND’s students with counselling that is up-to-date with the latest developments, regulations and knowledge. We also want to ensure that the answers are primarily based on a counselling professionalism and applicable rules – and less on fellow students’ own experiences of, for example, how challenging a course is, which will always be a subjective experience.
• streamline and ensure fast responses to students.
• create a better working environment for our student counsellors, so that no one has the sole responsibility for the entire counselling burden on a single programme.
• be able to focus more on preventive counselling to ensure students make good study choices and maintain their well-being and a sense of mastery throughout their studies.

It is possible that counselling efforts across faculties and programmes at SDU might be better integrated and co-ordinated. We are aware of this.

The new organisation will take effect from autumn 2024. At SUND, we will continue to keep an eye on the quality of the counselling efforts, and they will be evaluated with input from the student counsellors, among others.