a growing experience - Student Services - University of Melbourne

HEALTH AND WELL-BEING OF INTERNATIONAL STUDENTSUSE OF UNIVERSITY HEALTH AND COUNSELLINGSERVICESRELATIVE USE OF HEALTH AND COUNSELLING SERVICESA reasonably high percentage of international students who responded to the survey,41.2 per cent, indicated that they felt they needed to obtain help from the universityhealth service. Students were responding in terms of their experiences to date duringthe current year. Since the survey was completed in April or May, the period of timereferred to was relatively brief, at most three months. It was also a period of timeencompassing summer and autumn months, when seasonal illnesses might beexpected to be less frequent than during the winter months. The rate of perceivedneed for help from the university counselling service was much lower, 27.6 per cent.The differential rates of perceived need for medical and counselling help werereinforced by the relative percentages of students who acted on their perceived needand went to the respective services for help: 62.2 per cent of those with a perceivedneed for medical help and 19.8 per cent of those with a perceived need for counsellinghelp actually sought help. This means that 27.5 per cent of the total sample ofinternational students said they had accessed health services, while only 5.8 per centof all respondents said they had accessed the counselling service. In all, about fivetimes as many international students used the health service compared with thenumber who used the counselling service.The higher use by international students of university medical services as opposed tocounselling services is consistent with the expectation that medical services are usedmore frequently than counselling services by university students in general. Evidenceof this is to be found elsewhere (Daroesman et al., (2004). Responding to a survey onthe perceived quality of university administrative and support services, 2,020University of Melbourne students rated their experiences of the university healthservice, while only 535 rated experiences of the counselling service. If, as seemslikely, these responses represent the relative number of students in the sample whoused each service, then the health service is used by more students than thecounselling service. When responses of international and domestic students in thisdata set are separated, it can be seen that about eight times as many internationalstudents used the health service compared with the number who used the counsellingservice, while only about three times as many domestic students used the healthservice compared with the number who used the counselling service.There are assertions in the literature that international students, in particular thosefrom Asian countries, use university medical services more than domestic students forwhat are essentially psychological problems, either because their stress levels have ledto physiological problems or because the reluctance to acknowledge a psychologicaldifficulty has resulted in the symptoms being interpreted physiologically. At the sametime such students are said to make less use of counselling services than domesticstudents for a range of culturally-based reasons (Braun & Browne, 1998; Carr et al.,2003; Mori, 2000; Zhang & Dixon, 2003). The relative rate of use of health andcounselling services by international students in the present study supports theassertion of higher use of health services, though this is not sufficient in itself to giveendorsement of the explanation offered in the literature.Rosenthal, Russell & Thomson, 2006 158