A new school year brings a new health and wellness initiative to Tabor Academy.

Julie Przybyszewski, the director of health services, said that in order to provide more comprehensive care for students, the health center is now open 24 hours, seven days a week.

The center has also added a new full time counselor, as well as retained the two part-time counselors, to provide support for emotional and mental illness.

The health center used to be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and after that it was an on-call system. If a student needed medical attention, the house parent in a dormitory building could call a nurse at any time.

“A lot of times it would be a phone call system and we’d give them direction over the phone, or come in to see them if we needed to,” Przybyszewski said. “That’s the way it had always been, so this year we decided to go 24/7 and have that access. We are fully staffed with all registered nurses, and that includes weekends as well.”

The change to be open and available to students all the time is part of the department’s desire to provide a more proactive approach to health and wellness.

“Before it was more reactive to illness and injury or emotional issues or concerns,” Przybyszewski said. “Now we’re trying to have a health and wellness promotion approach.”

To accommodate the new hours, the health center now has eight registered nurses, seven of whom are full-time. The eighth is part-time, and the center also employs a per diem nurse who can come in as needed.

“We’ve virtually almost doubled our staff,” Przybyszewski said.

To help provide support for students’ emotional wellbeing, the health center also hired a new director of counseling, Dan Petrocelli, to provide more complete care. The counseling center will have someone available to students at all times as well.

“[Petrocelli] is planning to have some walk in hours for students who are having a tough time and need some help and guidance,” Przybyszewski said.

Przybyszewski is hoping that herself, Petrocelli, Dean of Students Melissa Bride and other faculty members can work together to look at even more comprehensive health and wellness planning.

“We want to do more in terms of group things and faculty training,” she said. “We want to be more proactive. We haven’t clearly planned it yet, as we’re coming from the ground up, but maybe we could do a health blog or health twitter, where we put out weekly health tweets relating to both physical health and emotional wellbeing.”

The school hopes that with a more comprehensive health and wellness initiative underway, students will feel the effects.

“We’re hoping that the programing will have a positive impact in terms of drugs, alcohol, healthy relationships, self esteem building and stress and anxiety management,” Przybyszewski said. “We hope it has a good impact.”