Dear Colleague,  

Mental health is an absolute priority for me, so I was pleased that so many of you joined Monday’s In conversation with the President event to help shape our new Imperial-wide strategy for mental health and wellbeing.

My particular thanks to Richard Martin (Director of Academic Services), Aglaia Freccero (Mental Health Officer at Imperial College Union), Hannah Bannister (Director of Student Services) and Harbhajan Brar (Director of HR) for their engaging presentation. If you missed it, you can watch a recording online. 

This new whole-institution strategy will cover a spectrum of issues, from boosting people’s wellbeing and supporting their resilience, to how we deliver direct support when people need it. It will make sure efforts across Imperial are joined-up and fit-for-purpose.

It was valuable to hear your questions and suggestions, from staff training to how we evaluate our work in this area. We will build these into our work.

Practically, this strategy will guide the changes we make. As Richard and Hannah said, this will include making the pilot of our early intervention officers in the Student Counselling and Mental Health Advice Service permanent; ensuring that student wellbeing advice is available in all our academic departments; and providing dedicated resources for staff wellbeing. More details on all of this and our implementation plan will be set out when we launch the strategy next month.

My thanks also to Consul Professor Liz Lightstone for moderating the Q&A. Next week’s Staff Briefing newsletter will follow up on themes and questions we were not able to cover in the meeting. 

In Monday’s session I also outlined the feedback you gave during our first phase of consultation on the new institutional strategy. We had over 2,500 individual responses, as well as group responses from faculties, departments and staff networks. Your pride in Imperial shone through in the survey responses. You also urged us to be more ambitious and specific in the next draft and to capture what is special and distinctive about Imperial.

Please do take the time to look through the feedback. We will set out how you can get involved in our second phase of institutional strategy consultation in the coming weeks. Our next event (10.30, Tuesday 27 June) will focus on this. I look forward to discussing in more detail then.

Best wishes, 

 Hugh 

Hugh Brady, President