Students need more accessible healthcare support when living away at university

A typical week for me as a student officer includes spending a lot of my time talking to students with complex needs and intersectional issues and then working with the university to help support them.

When it comes to students’ health, I am increasingly seeing the tricky decisions that they have to make as a result of the current healthcare system and the impact this has on their university experience.

There’s a new government and health is on the agenda, but there’s much more to this conversation that includes students, so let’s talk about it.

Location, location, location

When moving away to university, students will often develop support systems like the ones they have at home, with new friends and society members fulfilling a good portion of support.

But as we know, many students need extra support. This can take the form of university mental health and disability support, medical assessments, doctors’ notes and NHS treatment waiting lists.

Many students live a life that is split between two places – university and home. As it stands, students can only register for a GP in one of those places presenting some very difficult challenges. Living between two different locations leaves students with a deceptively simple choice – whether to transfer their GP registration to a new place or stay registered at a GP that they don’t live anywhere near for most of their year.

Both options have the reverse of the same problem. If they move their healthcare to university, they are stranded from their GP during periods at home and if they keep their care at home, they are isolated from GP care at university.

Students are required to live flexible lives in a medical system that refuses to be flexible for them.

Tough compromises

In my experience, students with disabilities, mental health issues, traumas or other health concerns are the ones who face the biggest challenges under the current restrictions. These students have to make compromises on their care and evaluate where they need support the most.

Students on waiting lists for mental health support are often unable to change their GP because they risk being taken off their waiting lists, so they keep registered at home and they are unable to access on-campus health support during term time.

Students who come to university to escape unsafe home situations have to decide whether they need support most when they have to live at home over the summer or if they need support for the rest of the year. If students move their registration to university, they are often isolated from medical support at home during particularly anxious periods, for example waiting for dissertation or exam results. For many students the choice of where to register for their GP is always a choice laden with hard choices and compromises.

Keeping a GP registration at home whilst at university incurs significant travel costs for necessary appointments and can consume a lot of time, an option made worse during a cost-of-living crisis when we know students are time poor. Many disabled students bear these issues to a greater extent because they sometimes have to rely on friends or family to take them to appointments across the country, making them feel guilty or like a burden on the people they have to depend on. Some feel unable to live independently and that causes a lot of stress when they are so far from home.

The problem of inflexible GP registration particularly affects students with children and dependents, since access to on-campus healthcare enables them to access care without being away from their dependents for longer than necessary.

In my conversations with students and staff I have also encountered failures of data-sharing causing significant harm to students and delays in getting support from GPs and the university. I have seen examples where students have had to recount extremely traumatic circumstances to complete strangers at new GPs, retraumatising themselves in order to get the support they need. I have seen students lose documents for medical conditions after registering with a new GP, meaning that they are now lacking available evidence for some university services, and sometimes having to restart the journey to diagnoses.

The difficulty of the evaluations that some students have to make, and the intolerable nature of the choices they are forced to consider as a result of the current system harms students’ abilities to succeed and thrive at university. It isn’t uncommon that students have dropped out in part because of the lack of consistency in their healthcare provision.

An agenda for student health

For students to succeed at university, they need access to two GPs, one at home, and one in their university area and information sharing needs to be much more consistent when changing GP registrations.

Students can register to vote in two places at the same time without democracy falling to its knees, so I doubt that these changes would be the final straw on the strained NHS. Additionally, the Health Secretary’s plans to digitise the NHS may make these suggestions more possible than ever so I hope he remembers his time as a representative of students and bears these issues in mind as he prosecutes his plans for reform.

Universities, SUs, and student support departments should work together on this matter. We all want students to have equal access to university and we want them to thrive as best they can whilst away from home. Consistently pushing for students to have two GPs in Parliament, in conferences and in consultations has the potential to change the prospects of many students who already face significant barriers to education.

We know student life is more complex than lectures and seminars and if we’re to make bigger waves we need elected officials to think about the holistic student experience and healthcare needs to be central to that agenda.