In the fall of 2024, two UT department heads teamed up with lofty goals: reduce wait times for mental health services on campus, clarify the process for students and for referring faculty and staff, and bolster staff morale. And a year later, all of those goals have been achieved thanks to an internal change referred to as Open Access.
According to Nicole Saylor, director of UT’s Student Counseling Center, the need for mental health support has been on an upward trend the last several years, but especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. Saylor says the utilization of the center has increased as has the complexity and acuteness of cases.
When she arrived on campus as director of the center in 2022, nearly 20 years to the day of when she graduated from UT herself, Saylor started asking the kinds of questions that new leaders often ask about staff retention, burnout, staff morale, and other aspects of the department’s operations.
“In the mental health field, there are lots of factors that contribute to many staff feeling like their jobs aren’t sustainable long-term, and we want to avoid that,” says Saylor. The center adopted a collaborative care model where staff specialize in one area, like triage and crisis or ongoing counseling. This model’s intent is to increase job satisfaction and decrease burnout as staff are able to focus on the part of the counseling process that they enjoy most.
In addition to the Student Counseling Center, the Center for Care and Resilience also provides mental health support on campus to students experiencing acute distress. Saylor, along with Lisa Loar, former director of the Center for Care and Resilience, worked to audit the intake systems in place across both departments to streamline the student experience regardless of which office they called first.
Both teams face a critical need to collaborate on crisis and triage to help students get the fastest care, and the right care, at the right time. Staff positions were rearranged to create a crisis and triage team of four full-time staff to serve both departments, overseen by a new assistant director in the Center for Care and Resilience. Administrative duties were also consolidated, with one administrative area now supporting both teams. Both teams are confidential, and the experience for students is a seamless warm handoff between the triage team with the Center for Care and Resilience and therapy services at the Student Counseling Center.
The teams also reimagined what triage appointments looked like. For students whose needs are outside the scope of the Student Counseling Center, the triage team immediately connects them to a care coordinator who can refer the student to a provider in the community, eliminating unnecessary wait time. And for students whose needs do fall within the scope of services available on campus, crisis and triage clinicians can live-schedule across both teams, reducing the administrative burden for students, who previously would have needed to call back to schedule care.
Altogether, these changes created a measurable improvement for the student experience. Operational changes related to Open Access reduced the student wait time from their initial call to a triage appointment by 1.71 days and from a triage appointment to an intake appointment to start therapy by 4.89 days.
Operational changes related to Open Access reduced the student wait time from their initial call to a triage appointment by 1.71 days and from a triage appointment to an intake appointment to start therapy by 4.89 days.
Loar states that according to internal records, no walk-in student experiencing distress waited longer than 30 minutes to talk to a clinician, many walking right into an appointment as soon as they completed their paperwork. Students who needed crisis appointments and reached out via phone were either seen immediately or scheduled for a same-day appointment according to the student’s availability. These facts illustrate the new triage model not only worked to facilitate greater care overall but worked to support more acute care for students in crisis.
“Conceptually, in practice, we’ve taken the collegiate mental health model and the best of the community behavioral health model and merged them into a system at UT that gets students connected to the right care at the right time,” says Loar.
Having a specialized team providing crisis and triage also freed up time for clinicians to provide more therapies, like group or individual counseling. The center offers 14–15 different types of group therapy meetings each semester for undergraduate students, graduate students, or in specific skills-based areas, like managing grief or ADHD. With the collaborative care model, the Student Counseling Center was able to increase the number of group therapy sessions offered from 700 during 2023–2024 to 965 in 2024–2025. This increase means students received over 8,600 hours of group therapy combined.
The care provided by UT is working. For students utilizing the Student Counseling Center, 87% say they would return again for services, 94% would recommend services to a friend, and 89% report the quality of their counseling was very good or excellent. The most common results students emphasize are that their counseling increased their ability to think critically or clearly about their problems; helped them gain a greater understanding of self or a clearer sense of identity; improved their ability to manage stress; and increased self-confidence or self-esteem.
For students utilizing the Student Counseling Center, 87% say they would return again for services, 94% would recommend services to a friend, and 89% report the quality of their counseling was very good or excellent.
Student mental health improvements at UT also surpass the national average. In 2023, UT began using the Center for Collegiate Mental Health’s Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms (CCAPS) survey more intentionally to benchmark progress. This survey evaluates common mental health concerns among college students nationwide. In key areas such as depression, anxiety, and substance use, clients at the UT Student Counseling Center showed statistically significant improvements compared to the national sample.
On a 4-point scale measuring overall distress, UT clients improved by an average of 0.41 points, exceeding the national average improvement of 0.375 points between the start and end of therapy. These results indicate the quality of services at UT is higher than expected compared to other institutions. The results also underscore UT’s commitment to providing effective mental health support that leads to measurable outcomes for students.
“As clinicians, we were always going to work collaboratively to get students the care they needed no matter what door they came through, providing the right care at the right time,” says Saylor. “But through this new model, not only are we delivering shorter wait times, more clinical therapy hours, and higher staff morale, but acute care for students in distress is also being deployed more easily. Wins all around.”