I'D HEARD the rumors about kids who had gone into the Student Health Center and had come out sicker.
The story about the girl who woke up one morning with a blue arm and went to Student Health, where they told her to just put some ice on it, sounded reasonable enough. But when I heard about how she discovered two days later at the hospital that she had a blood clot in her shoulder, I just dismissed it as urban legend.
For most students, in times of illness the only recourse is to go to Student Health. So when I got sick with a burning fever and a throat ache, I crawled over to the brick building on Brandon Avenue for some substitute-mom TLC. Nearly a month later, my temperature doesn't sore into the triple digits and I am not in a permanent state of dizzy delirium. But I am left with a heavy breathing pattern that makes people stare during class and the lethargy of an illness that never went away. Tired of the assortment of inhalers, medication and blood tests that the Center has hurled my way, I have given up until I go home for spring break and whine to my family physician. But it has been disappointing to experience Student Health's inefficiency.
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Although it is a clean, fairly streamlined clinic, Student Health's veneer of efficiency can't mask the incompetence that underlies their service. In my visits, I have been examined by a student nurse who couldn't find my pulse, a resident who couldn't find my spleen, and an attendant who couldn't find the stethoscope in his pocket. At first, I turned the sickly cheek to these suspicious blunders. I understood that the Student Health is also a training ground for the students it serves. But when I went in last time and the lab technician didn't know how to find my vein for a blood test, I knew it was the last straw.
The fundamental problem with the Student Health practitioners is that they don't take the time to find out what is wrong with you before they start scribbling prescriptions on their notepads. It's understandable that they are on a tight time schedule and must be quick, but the time they spend with each patient should be used to determine his underlying problem, not explain how to swallow pills. This inattention to detail often creates more hassles than relief.
Student Health needs to be effective because it serves such an interactive community of youngsters. With many students living in dorms, close quarters spread and magnify illness quicker than a mosquito transmits malaria. In addition, Student Health also forgets their purpose as centrally located medical care.
"When I was a freshman, I went to Student Health and they gave me a prescription for some antibiotics, but didn't have them available," said College student Ann Marshall. "So they told me I'd have to go to CVS. The point was that I had walked there because I had no transportation."
This need to seek outside service is unfair. Students shouldn't have to go to a drug store for medicine, nor should they have to trek out to the hospital for a second opinion when something still doesn't feel right. Miles from their families, it's hard for students to estimate on their own how sick is too sick and how much needs to be done when. For many, this is the first time they must deal with illness without their moms spoon feeding them chicken soup.
"Our complaints are 50/50 between people who were only offered medicine and people who didn't get enough medicine," said Student Health Center Quality Improvement Coordinator Madeline Jones in a phone interview. "We also find that negative stories get spread to over a dozen people, while positive responses are shared with fewer. It's just not as juicy to share a good experience."
According to Jones, Student Health has a variety of patient satisfaction monitors, from the unsolicited feedback they receive to the Satisfaction Surveys they email randomly to one in 10 patients to the Staff Quality Reviews they perform every few months. But while these measures are steps in the right direction in trying to gauge student satisfaction, they have still not translated into effective general health care.
At such a large University, it's imperative that there is a solid health care infrastructure supporting students. Students shouldn't have to second guess medical opinions, and they shouldn't have to struggle through a long bout with mediocre health when the cure is so readily available. All that stands between them and their original good health is the shoddy, inattentive treatment they were offered at Student Health. So until the system changes, students might just be better off calling home anyway.
(Diya Gullapalli is a Cavalier Daily associate editor.)
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