College of Science

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Humans of the U: Sherrá Watkins

Transcript:

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Hi, my name is David Pace, and this is Pace Yourself, the University of Utah College of Science podcast on Wellness. 

Today my guest is Sherrá Watkins, associate vice president for student health and wellness here at the U where she oversees six departments: Student Health, Center for Student Wellness, Campus Recreation, the University Counseling Center, the Center for Disability and Access and Financial Wellness. Welcome. 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 0:31

Thank you. Good to be here. Good morning. 

 

David Pace 0:33

It’s nice to have you here. So we are getting ready, it sounds like, to launch a resilience, health, wellness, resilience Initiative one you. Yes. Let’s jump in right there. I guess that’s going to happen in May. Can you tell us a little bit about how that folds into the work that you’re doing in these six departments? 

 

Healthy, Happy and Whole

 

Sherrá  Watkins 0:54

Yes. So when I came in October of 2020 to Lori McDonald, who’s the Vice President of student health and Wellness—the Vice President over Student Affairs decided that she wanted to realign the engagement of student affairs to create a culture of well-being here on the campus. In order to do that, she Uralla and the Departments for Student Affairs to be up under one area. That focused on students and the entire culture of the campus. But my particular position did not focus on faculty and staff. With the provost coming along last year in 2024. There were some conversations that had started with me doing my campus tour of meeting all of the deans and the chairs, and I shared some of that feedback when I got to do my meet-and-greet with Mitzi. And there were some moving initiatives of how do we begin to focus that culture of care with faculty and staff? 

 

David Pace 2:01

That’s Mitzi Montoya the provost. 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 2:04

And so there was the new wave of that initial initiative creating the task force of the Well-Being and Resiliency Initiative. And so that task force was created, and we needed that task force to focus on faculty and staff, because my position just focuses on just students. And so the task force was created with faculty liaisons and fellows, and then it was headed, as far as consultants, with myself and also the Chief Wellbeing Officer for U. Health, Amy, Dr. Amy Locke. 

And so based off of our expertise with Amy being over U Health and then myself being over the campus as a whole, but particularly the narrow focus of students, we provided our expertise on what does the simple true say organizational health and well-being look like? And with helping the task force begin to define what does wellbeing and wellness look like from an organizational standpoint for faculty and staff. 

 

David Pace 3:09

So the task force included, if I’m not mistaken, stakeholders from the entire university community, including staff, including staff. So I asked that because that kind of answers the first question that I was thinking of, of bringing up, which is since you’re with working with students, how does that interface with faculty and staff? And I think you just answered that. Because this podcast actually began for staff, essentially. But of course, we want to appeal to the broader community as well, faculty and administration and so forth. So that answers that question. That’s interesting. So can you tell us a little bit about this rollout? Is it formal or is it already happening? 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 3:57

It’s already happening. We started with just some conversations of what is currently happening on campus so that we don’t have to be redundant?  And as I told the task force and I share with Keith Diaz Moore, who is leading out on this initiative, is that even in my work, I cannot focus on students without focusing on faculty and staff because they see the students every day. My staff that provide the services and resources for students. We receive the direct referrals from staff. We help train the faculty and staff because they also are what we call gatekeepers. They also see the symptoms. They also can triage for us. And so it goes hand-in-hand. 

And we also know most importantly, one of my infamous statements that I say is that healthy, happy, whole faculty and staff means healthy, happy, whole students. And so as we try to make sure in this task force, my biggest thing is that there has to be some alignment in the types of resources and also in terms. We can’t have two separate definitions of well-being and wellness for how we defined it for students and have totally separate definitions of how we define it for faculty and staff. 

And so when we talk about this broader slogan of what is a culture of well-being, yes, students and faculty and staff are different, but the terms need to have some alignment, meaning that if we’re all walking down this pathway to try to look at how do we reach this overarching definition of what is well-being—which is the definition of what is the betterment of my health, how do I define that for who I am as identified gender, race, culture, my purpose—how do we define that for this entire campus? And how do we create the resources and the tools to make sure and ensure that everyone can get there based off of their own definition? 

And so that has been what I have been trying to ensure that there is some alignment in that, regardless of if it’s students or faculty and staff. And so in our meetings that we’ve been having so far, it’s just looking at current literature and what are other campuses doing as far as other Big 12 universities who are already doing this type of work? 

And then how do we make sure in this task force that we have both the research, we have both the active innovations as far as what services and then also what is implementation look like to ensure, most importantly, what we’re hearing from faculty and staff is accountability. 

If we’re getting feedback and we’re getting recommendations, faculty and staff want to hold us accountable for, If I give you information, how can we ensure it will be rolled out and I am heard? 

 

David Pace 7:04

Yeah, it’s funny. It’s not funny, but it’s interesting that you bring this up because we had a survey that we distributed through the College of Science fairly recently about health and wellness, wellness in particular, which is kind of a more nebulous term perhaps, I don’t know, we can maybe unpack that a little bit later. But one of the criticisms that we had of the College of Science—it’s always hard to get criticisms—is that, you know, you’re talking a lot about wellness, but when we get directives from administration, it seems like you’re not factoring that in at all, whether it’s, like, you have to have this survey in by noon and we got it at 6 a.m.  So what is that all about? 

You know, to be fair, we had to send it through the departments and they delayed sending it out, but the point is that they feel the need for accountability. Don’t just talk about wellness on a podcast. Ahem. But actually deploy it as you make specific requirements and requests or demands even of the staff. You know, because the staff, I think being one of them myself, sometimes the concern is that we are being overloaded with expectations that were not part of our job description to begin with. 

And of course, that’s bound to happen in any job. I think right now, especially with the realignment of funds that are going to be distributed from the legislature and even nationally, some of the concerns that people have of higher education and some how we’re in an ivory tower. 

I don’t feel like I’m in an ivory tower. Do you?

 

Timing is Everything

 

Sherrá  Watkins 8:53

I think it is more brownish at this point? But you make a valid point. And the point that you make is the same point that I that I tell faculty when it comes to assignments. You know, one of the biggest variables that we can change, what I call low hanging fruit, is when we give assignments. If we can just push back the assignment deadline to 8:00. I know most of the faculty when I mentioned this, when I was going to do my meet-and-greet tour, they were like, We push it to midnight because we have students who have families and they work and we want to give them the most amount of time. 

And I said that makes total sense. We when you look at the current data, we have a variety of students. And my counter to that is, is that if we put all of the assignments on the syllabus ahead of time, and we give them the deadline that this will be due at 8:00, what we have seen in national research is that whether we put it at 8:00 PM or at midnight is that we get the same deliverables. 

And deliverables is that we’re trying to push back and increase sleep hygiene because we know that in our current studies is that if we’re trying to increase sleep hygiene, increase better health overall and wellness is that one quick change in changing the time that we do for implementation for assignments is that we make that change and students are getting more sleep. 

And so we have to begin to change our mindset of how we see ourselves as students and then what was done to us. We don’t necessarily have to keep that same type of paradigm. And so we till we make that small change because in our current study of the American College Health Assessment here for this university—not comparing ourselves to others—the average amount of sleep is five to six hours. 

 

David Pace 10:59

Mm hmm. That’s not enough. Enough for me. 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 11:01

Well, you know, we’re not going to even talk about those because the is the basis. 

Sherrá  Watkins 11:06

This is for students. They have one for faculty as staff. I’m not going to make that number. 

 

David Pace 11:10

Okay? 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 11:11

We’re not going to share that. 

 

David Pace 11:12

So you use the term “hygiene”? Yes. Yeah. And I like that because it’s about, you know. 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 11:21

Routine. 

 

David Pace 11:21

Routine. Yeah. So I get up in the morning and I have my hygiene routine, or we all do. Yeah. Brush our teeth and…

 

Sherrá  Watkins 11:28

Hygiene means that is flexible is it can be balanced. It creates the nuance of it can change from season to season. My sleep hygiene in the summer versus the fall, daylight saving times, you know, that may be changing here in Utah. So we don’t know. It can vary. And as students and as adults, that gives us the ability to have privilege in some times and also the advantage to say I may need five or six hours for this time, but I know that I can flex it more and get what I really, truly need, which is seven to eight hours, maybe next week or in a couple of more months once I get past, you know, midterms or something like that. 

 

David Pace 12:11

So I think it’s interesting that you’ve come up with a real concrete, simple solution to part of the problem, which is just change the deadline. What a concept. 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 12:25

That can also be reversed to faculty too, which is that if an administration wants certain feedback, certain information, deliver it in a timely manner and then give a timely deadline set too. What we do for students, we should also do for faculty and staff. 

 

David Pace 12:42

So we have a survey coming out pretty quick from your department, is that correct? 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 12:45

Yes. 

 

David Pace 12:46

So you should look for that. 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 12:47

Yes. And so I made the recommendation to the task force is that we should have, again, alignment of what we deliver to students bi-annually, which is two surveys. The American College Health Association, we deliver for students the National College Health Assessment, which is a wellness assessment following one of your future questions, which looks at our nine dimensions of wellness. The pathways to get to be healthy, happy and whole. 

And then we do want to just focus on mental health. So only looking at mental health questions from stigma and to your emotional health and well-being and then also access. And that is done by the JED National organization known as the Healthy Minds Survey. So I had a brain freeze, the Healthy Minds assessment. 

And so they also have one for faculty and staff. That was my recommendation is that if our counterparts of the Big 12 and other universities and colleges are doing that with their faculty and staff, and we are also doing it with our students, now we can also have comparables. We can compare what a what are we seeing with our students and then what are we seeing with that faculty and staff. 

There are some similar questions, but also some vastly different questions because of the populations. And now we can compare it to our constituents. What are other colleges that are 30,000-plus and even also 10,000 or less? 

 

The Wellness Wheel 

 

David Pace 14:20

Okay. Yeah. So, again, you’re trying to align all of this because we have tremendous resources here at the University of Utah. But we can get lost in the in the trees if we don’t understand how they do align or if they align. 

So getting back to the dimensions of wellness. So this podcast has been operating on the National Institutes of Health’s eight dimensions. You’ve got nine. Yes. And so one that the one that we’re missing is cultural. Can you unpack that a little bit for us? What does that mean? Because that will lead us to a couple of other questions. 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 14:58

Mean, I’m pretty sure when I came here, I must say that I was interviewing for the position and I went to different websites from the U. Health to School of Medicine to dentistry, and I saw six different dimensions. I mean, I was like, Oh, oh my goodness. And so being from North Carolina, I use the colloquialism I had to clutch all my pearls. 

And so one of the that idea in bringing the task force that was already together, which was the task force. So if you did not know, we are officially as of August of last year, an officially a jade campus, which means that we focus on health equity, reducing stigma for mental health, an increase in access for all of our students and if we are focusing on those three aspects, that means that we have to focus on the whole student. And focusing on the whole student means that that it is cultural.  Cultural wellness is that we are looking at the whole student. And that means whether it’s gender, race, spirituality, and when we look at the whole population of our student campus, we have students that are international we have students of all different races. 

Though most of our students, between 50 and 60% come from Utah, that is still a very much a melting pot. We have students who are immigrants. We have students who are first gen. And so looking at how do we build a sense of belonging on this campus, how do we ensure that all of our health and wellness resources are accessible and also can meet the needs of these different, various students? 

And so, I believe that culture must be a very important factor. And one of the important dimensions of our wellness, wheel, as we say, are the dimensions of wellness. And so as we were focusing on JED, I put it back to the task force and that just from my opinion to say we’re looking at all the different campuses and universities, what is going to be our wellness wheel? We’ll support all the wellness worlds together and said, what is going to be our one wellness wheel for this campus? Are we going to include culture? Some universities also include a technology dimension also. And so this final wellness wheel that we have I’m leaning to did include culture. 

 

Navigating the dismantling of “DEI”

David Pace 17:15

Related to that then is and maybe this is beating a dead horse—is that impolitic to say that?— but okay, let’s just say that the state legislature just trashed the DEI initiative. I’ll be blunt about it. And it’s been traumatic for a lot of us because so much of what the university has been about is exactly what you were just talking about. Are we just changing the language around this or. I mean. I mean, I’m not knocking the language change or anything. We have to do what we have to do because we are funded by the state legislature. But how do we provide this accessibility while honoring the diversity, equity and inclusion that we no longer can formally do? 

Is that a fair enough question? Is that a question that you are willing to answer? 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 18:10

I can definitely answer the question is. It’s a conversation that we’re having among our national organization is because we’re not the only state is the question that my staff immediately answered. And so, I would answer that in a couple of different ways. Number one, there were immediate carve-outs for health and wellness, okay? 

 

David Pace 18:29

And so they weren’t touching that. 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 18:31

They weren’t they were not touching that. If it meant of how we are able to provide health and wellness services, there were carve-outs, and we made sure we worked with our legal team to ensure what that meant. 

And so, if we were providing medical treatment or even up under the purview—because some people still don’t consider counseling, medical, let’s just say, it is still very much stigmatized—we make sure that we followed what the recommendation from the legislature means. 

So what we had to do was for students who were receiving wellness coaching or mental health counseling, which fell upon the group or individual, those students had to follow all our written protocol.

 So, if it was individual or group coaching or counseling, those students will be identified as receiving a treatment or a service. So that did not change. And so, the legislation did not touch any of those areas. However, those specific pieces that that it did affect is—let’s say we wanted to have a group that focused on women who were survivors of sexual assault—it’s still a medical treatment, and it can be a mental health group, but because it focuses just on women only, we had to make sure it fell up under how do we categorize that as a medical group for mental health? 

And so we had to follow certain rules to make sure that if it was publicized, that it also was identified as a medical treatment type of group. And so whether they fell up under our counseling or a wellness, because I know you may be familiar with that victim survivor advocacy, which follows up under our Center for a Campus wellness, that is not mental health counseling, that follows up under more of a coaching and support group. 

And so, we still had to follow those guidelines making sure that we identify that this is a mental health support group that has an identified counselor, or coach there for support. And then you have to follow a, what we call, a triage process to be able to be identified in that group for safety. Because we do not want those who may be identified as those who harm to be able to access those survivors in those groups. 

And so, we just once again worked with our legal counsel to make sure that we provide supports and also precautions for those who are seeking those types of services to have those same types of protections. 

When it comes to larger scope groups, like we have those who are in recovery. So we have like we call our healing teas and workshops, those types of groups are open to all. And so we still make sure that those are open. 

And so that’s the first part of how we ask the question. The second way I would ask the question is the hard way that I had to tell my staff is that I’ve been in this field since 2004. My first background is in public health, and my second background is that I’m a licensed clinician. And the hard way that I had to say it, because I had to say it to myself, was we have been doing this work without saying DEI. Since 2004 before it became popular. 

 

David Pace 22:06

Oh, okay, This is not new. 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 22:09

This is not new. And so I remember before we actually started really focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion, those were not popular terms that we were taught in that intro classes and population health classes. And so, for some of those colleagues who are newer in the field, but in some of us who are not new, I said we need to go back to the basics. How do we still do the work without saying the words? And I said, I know it’s hard, and I say it for some of my staff. Many of us may transition out because this is not what we signed up for. And as  a leader, how can I help make sure that I support you in your transition? Because as a great leader, that’s what I’m supposed to do.

For those of us who still need to do the work, how can I support you in the midst of this transition? Because now I need to provide coaching and even counseling for some as we weather this storm. And then for those of us who are in that ambivalence period, how do we once again still do the work but also gain the footing of helping our students who are transitioning? 

So we are similar, okay? But we don’t know how to be there to support the students because we’re still trying to determine like how we are navigating our own feelings. And we’ve got students who are coming to us, and they are just not okay. And so, as a leader it is like helping to transition and do this work with three different categories of employees who are in, what we call in public health, going through various stages of change. 

 

David Pace 23:48

Right? 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 23:49

That’s the hard part. 

 

Learning from history

 

David Pace 23:50

Part. So it sounds like you’re taking a more granular approach than to and maybe, you know, I like to think of myself as an optimist. So, I’d like to think that this conversation that we’re having will have some profoundly beneficial, generative outcomes. 

Sherrá  Watkins 24:07

I am optimistic. I think the one thing I have had great mentors throughout the course of my career, having worked at multiple medical schools, having done this work in public health and also as a clinician. I remember sitting with one of my mentors as this was coming down the pipeline. I saw it coming, and I remember sitting there, and I said something that was very blunt. So excuse me if this is coming off as offensive, but I remember sitting in one of my medical courses and learning about all of the systemic racism in the medical field,  the Tuskgegee experiments and Henrietta Lacks, and I said to her, these types of stories that we learned in science and history have been pervasive in the medical field. And so what I have learned is that if we don’t learn from history, we will constantly repeat it. And I truly don’t think we learn from history. And so, coming back and circling this these toxic topics of DEI again, I’m just not surprised. 

And maybe that’s just me in, but I don’t think that we learn from it because I know Henrietta Lacks family just now really got their due diligence 

 

David Pace 28:22

She was at the nexus of all of this. 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 28:24

Of everything. And so that’s what I mean when I tell my staff and as I work with my mentors, is that when we talk about systemic racism and historical trauma of how it has led to science, medical, population, health, we still have—before I got here, I was working in a medical school and this is what I taught in behavioral sciences—we still have medical students who believe that Black patients have thicker skin and therefore have a higher disproportion in belief of higher pain tolerance. 

 

David Pace 29:02

Wow, that’s staggering. 

 

People with disabilities

 

Sherrá  Watkins 29:05

So we still we’re still here. Yeah. And so we still have work to do. And I am a believer that we can still do the work. My fear is that as we’re continuing to do the work, and we can’t say the term,  is that people have to remember that when we’re talking about diversity, equity and inclusion, there has been a focus on gender, race, sexual orientation. And I just have to say that we cannot forget about the population who sometimes go unseen, which is our students and our staff and faculty who have disabilities. And I think that has been left out of the conversation because one of the other reasons why I make sure that we include a culture is that within my first 90 days of being here, our students who are living with various forms of disability, that’s the student groups chronically us. And another student group called me on the carpet and said, We’re here and we haven’t been heard. They wanted to former they wanted a disability center just for them. 

And so, these students are here, and there are faculty and staff who are here who have mental and physical disabilities, and their voices want to be heard, too. But in this conversation of the DEI, there is a population that is a part of that that people are also forgetting, too. 

 

Health Literacy | Health Navigation

 

David Pace 30:39

Yeah, that’s a very good reminder. We’re running out of time at this point. But I wanted to acknowledge the fact that we have a boots-on-the ground services for students. I’m thinking of the Peer Well-Being Navigation Program. Do you want to talk about that for a moment? How does that work?

 

Sherrá  Watkins 30:59

Yes, that is one of my babies. Coming from the hospital setting. I’ve been very all over the place. I come from population health, I’m working with patients, living with sickle cell and patients living HIV. And I’ve always worked in multidisciplinary care,

 Being first gen [first generation college student] and I remember coming to school and never have made a doctor’s appointment in my life and at one point didn’t even have health care. And as I talked to faculty and staff in my tour, there’s a belief that no is only focus on students that come from marginalized spaces and places. And my approach to is that it is not only focus on students who come from historically marginalized places, we also have to focus on, as I say, the full continuum of students, students who come from historically marginalized places and students who come from privilege. Both of those student [groups] on both of those continuums and students who are in the middle, many of them don’t know how to really navigate our health care system. 

Not all of them know how to make a doctor’s appointment. Some of them do not know how to read a health insurance card. Not all of them know what a deductible is. And so how do we make sure from a very simple term, provide health literacy? 

Health literacy is that they know how to make a doctor’s appointment, read a health insurance card, understand financial literacy, which means that they know how to open a bank account, know what it means to understand their financial aid, but also if they get a doctor’s bill, how that may impact whether they can stay in school or have to sometimes fall out. 

All of that is health literacy. And so, health navigation, overall, I wanted it to bring that here and create that same thing. So, if a student is lost and they have just a simple thought of I’m unwell. 

Sherrá  Watkins 32:54

But I don’t know where to start. I wanted for them to have that understanding of at least know I at least know where to go. That is peer would be navigation. Okay. If you don’t know what door to enter are, even as faculty and staff, a student comes to you and says, I don’t know where to go, but I know I’m unwell. And we typically always send them to the Dean of Students office, which is not always the best because they’re sometimes seen as punitive. Our peer wellness navigators are students have been trained as case managers and also navigators to say, let’s just have a conversation. Tell me what you’re going through, and I can help you to navigate options. And they will try an option with them. And if it doesn’t work, they will come back and follow with a follow up with them three to five times into. They find them the best access door and to get them started. 

 

David Pace 33:48

So, you have a continuum of students, but you also have what I think you call on your website a continuum of care, which is, I think it’s kind of reminds me of the hidden curriculum that first generation students sometimes have. They don’t they don’t even know what the questions are they should be asking. And so this is an intervention for that. 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 34:10

It is sometimes what we as I don’t know that I know that I’m going to my annual doctor’s appointment and I have this list of questions, but which one do I ask first? And they say we only have 15 minutes, and we try to ask the rapid questions. It’s the same thing for us too. 

 

David Pace 34:24

Right? Yeah. So we were going to talk about your North Carolina background and the clutching all my pearls. 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 34:35

Barbecue and chill wine.  

 

David Pace 34:37

Yeah, but we’ll have to hold off on that for another time. But I wanted to, I wanted to acknowledge that you come from a background that had its own challenges and, you know, that’s part of the South, which has its historical challenges as well. But having navigated that yourself, even without a mentor or a peer mentor, right?, that you’ve arrived at this place at the University of Utah, and we’re really excited to have you here. I know that’s it’s been a few years, but welcome. 

So our guest today is Sherrá  Watkins, and she is the associate vice president for student health and wellness here at the U. And we haven’t even talked about all six departments that you oversee. Everything from recreation to counseling to, of course, disability and access and financial wellness. 

So a lot of work is being done by you. And I want to personally thank you for being with us here this morning and all the best with the launch of the Resilience, Health and Wellness Resilience Center Initiative. 

 

Sherrá  Watkins 35:51

Thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me. 

 

David Pace 35:53

Thank you.