Inauguration of UB’s first welfare room in Bellvitge

Today, Wednesday, May 31, the welfare room was inaugurated at the Bellvitge Campus, a pioneering initiative in the Catalan university scene, promoted by the Vice-Rector’s Office of Equal Opportunities and Gender to promote work-life balance and welfare in the workplace.

The welfare room, located on the fourth floor of the Aulari building, is a 15-square-meter space (the former room 427). It has several functions, all of them related to wellness and care: it is designed for breastfeeding babies and storing milk, as well as for injecting medication —such as insulin in the case of people with diabetes, or hormones, among others—, and also as a place to rest, for all those who are feeling unwell. It is aimed at the entire university community: students, teaching and research staff (TRS) and administration and services staff (AdSS). For this reason, the room is equipped with a sink, a comfortable chair for breastfeeding or resting, a refrigerator, a microwave, a cabinet for storing pots that also serves as a changing table and a hospital bunk chair.
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The Vice-rector for Equal Opportunities and Gender, Montserrat Puig, thanked during the event the involvement of the Bellvitge Campus in the initiative and explained that this is a pioneering initiative within the university system, as well as a demand from the university community, as reflected in the Survey on Self, Child and Dependent Care in March 2023. “The university must be egalitarian and inclusive, attending to the diversity of people who study and work in it; that is why it is necessary to take more actions to promote work-life balance and the welfare of people”, says Puig.

To use the welfare room, people just need to ask for the password at the Campus information point and return it when they stop using it. It is necessary to leave as a reference the NIUB (in the case of students) or the ID number (in the case of TRS or AdSS). The control of the proper use of the space is carried out by the same people who control the state of the classrooms.

Until now, only the Barcelona Science Park had a breastfeeding room. The wellness room that is now being inaugurated is the first of its kind at the UB, but two other campuses are expected to set up spaces for this use in the near future. In addition, the negotiating committee of the third bloc of the Equality Plan is working on similar actions, and the actions of the Guide to care, work-life balance and time management will soon be disseminated among the university community.