Student Health and Counseling's new health education manager plans to revamp the Peer Education Program, after serving as a peer educator while she attended UNM.
Jessica Spurrier will oversee scheduling presentations and training peer educators.
Spurrier said the Peer Education Program allows students to teach other students about various health topics, such as depression and stress management. The students interact in one-on-one settings or through group presentations.
The program will now try to reach out to students through technological outlets that students use daily, Spurrier said.
She has been working on setting up Internet tools to get the message out to more students and for them to have more venues to contact the program for information, she said.
"We are trying to take a look at how can we disseminate information about upcoming events and screenings and how can we be better at communicating with students using the tools that students are using rather than posting things all the time on hard copy or handing out flyers," Spurrier said. "Certainly, we'll continue to use that, but we understand and appreciate that students are using other means to communicate and that we need to jump on the bandwagon."
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Beverly Kloeppel, director of Student Health and Counseling, said Spurrier is a model of what the program tries to promote and create within student participants.
"She's probably somebody who has gained some skills in her participation in the Peer Education Program back when she was a student at UNM that helped her in her job duties today," Kloeppel said.
Kloeppel said she hopes Spurrier will be able to use peer education and other kinds of programs to promote health among students.
Spurrier said she is trying to collaborate with campus groups that aim to help students make better health decisions. One of her first initiatives was researching where students can find condoms on campus.
"Students know it's important to use condoms, but if they are hard to come by, will they be put in a position at some point that they end up not using them?" she said. "It should be relatively convenient to exercise, to make good food choices, to practice safer sex - and so it's neat to see these various organizations and groups involved in trying to promote good health."
Kloeppel said Spurrier's enthusiasm is contagious and that students will hopefully pick that up while working with her.
Former peer educator Celeste Lee said her semester-long experience with the program was invaluable. Lee consulted students one-on-one about their nutrition choices.
"I got so much out of it," she said. "I would highly recommend it, because you are able to practice what you learn.. It allowed me to apply what I had learned in a clinical setting. It was an incredible experience."
Lee now participates in the program by aiding in training peer educators about nutrition.
The Peer Education Program also allows students to earn course credit through an academic department while they are working within Student Health and Counseling.
Student Sherry Neal is studying nutrition and said she joined the program this semester because she wanted counseling experience.
"I just want to educate myself on all of those health issues and try to get some more experience that I might not be able to get elsewhere, and not only experience, but more information," she said.
Nutrition was one of the top requested presentations - along with stress management - last semester, Spurrier said.
Student Health and Counseling practitioners communicate with the Peer Education Program about what problems students frequently come into the clinic for, she said.
"For instance, a student might go in and talk to the physician about a health issue, and the physician mentions that maybe their blood pressure might also come down a little bit if they managed their weight a little bit better, so they might meet with one of the (peer educators) to talk about some strategies to manage weight through dietary changes or increased activity levels," she said.
If students want further information about what they are struggling with, they are referred to resources specializing in that topic, Spurrier said.
However, most of the time just talking to a fellow student can do a world of good, she said.
"Health education is not clinical," Spurrier said. "It's really about lifestyle choices, and so much of it goes back to pretty basic information about students getting sufficient sleep, being hydrated, making sure they aren't drinking a lot of alcohol or doing things that are counter-productive to physical and mental or emotional health."
For more information about the Peer Education Program, visit unm.edu/~shcl or call (505) 277-7947.
