Student Health Care Overview
While your educational journey can be an exciting time, burnout, depression, and anxiety appear at high levels within medical students and physician populations. Therefore, it is incredibly important to take proactive steps to ward off those troubling realities. That’s why we’ve made a commitment to supporting your health and wellness an integral part of the KansasCOM experience.
Commitment to Wellness
At KansasCOM, our faculty and staff speak frequently to students about personal wellness and a commitment to staying healthy. You’ll engage in regular conversations about general wellness, how to assess your own personal wellness, and what concrete steps you can take to maintain personal and professional wellness to perform your best and stay healthy in a high-stress field.
Reach Your Full Potential
Students of osteopathic medicine consciously choose a career field that is highly stressful—physician practices and decisions can mean life or death for patients. If you are struggling with your own personal and professional wellness, you may not meet your full potential and may only be able to provide suboptimal care. This could put your medical license and the lives of future patients at risk.
What Is Wellness?
Wellness is a multidimensional state of being focused on an awareness of one’s personal health in a variety of elements:
- Environmental
- Occupational
- Physical
- Psychological
- Social
- Spiritual
The concept of “wellness” is very osteopathic in nature in that it focuses on the total person and explores the relationships among the various dimensions of wellness. Understanding the interrelatedness and interconnectivity of the various dimensions is important to achieving comprehensive wellness.
KansasCOM’s Approach to Wellness
To ensure optimal support for the wellness of our students, we have established a number of resources unique to KansasCOM:
Mayo Clinic Partnership
KansasCOM is working to secure a partnership with the Mayo Clinic to provide a state-of-the-art, innovative wellness curriculum to our students as well as regular wellness assessments that provide students with consistent feedback on their own perceptions of their personal wellness.
Regular Wellness Assessment
Students will take and receive feedback from the Mayo Clinic’s Well-Being Index, a tool designed to compare individual wellness levels to the overall population. Students who discover concerning results can then utilize a variety of resources created by the Mayo Clinic to reduce the potential impact of negative results.
Wellness Council
At KansasCOM, we believe that student wellness initiatives should come from students themselves. Therefore, the Office of Student Affairs and Services will host monthly wellness meetings with student leaders to talk about issues around student wellness and create wellness programming to enhance students’ overall experience.
Wellness Calendar
KansasCOM, working with the student-run Wellness Council, will produce a yearlong calendar of wellness-related initiatives. Some fun, some informative, some inspiring—all related to increasing student wellness.
Health Care Resources
KansasCOM also provides a wide variety of health care resources for students. From off-campus physician resources (see below for details), to free 24/7 access to mental health services, students will find a variety of on- and off-campus options available to them.
Physical Health Services
KansasCOM does not provide on-site student health services. However, students may seek health care through a group of off-campus clinical providers endorsed by KansasCOM. Students may seek medical services for acute care or short-term treatment at any of the endorsed providers.
Students are encouraged to establish a health care home with a primary care provider from within this endorsed network. If a student requires chronic care or needs to be seen during off hours, this provider should be contacted first. Clinic information is available to students from the Office of Student Affairs and Services. Students need to present their insurance card when seeing any health care provider. All expenses for health services are the responsibility of the student.