As flowers bloom and allergy season begins, Georgetown students are putting mounting pressure on the Student Health Center to improve its services.
Meant to provide all of the services that a student would expect from a family doctor or local clinic, the center has eight certified non-specialized doctors on the payroll. However, only about five doctors or nurse practitioners are at the office on an average day.
“Demand is not uniform,” Vice President of Health Services James Welsh explained. He said that the unpredictability of seasonal ailments such as allergies and the flu, as well as the need to meet the changing requirements of the academic calendar, cause demand to fluctuate and make it difficult to match the number of physicians to the number of patients.
This is one reason offered to account for the long waits which many students complain that they experience. Peter Dugan (SFS ‘05) said that he was put on hold for 45 minutes when he called to schedule an appointment.
Other students have encountered similar problems.
“I had called four days earlier, and that was the earliest they could get me in,” Eleanor Gillespie (CAS ‘06) said. After Gillespie’s appointment was cancelled due to a scheduling error, she said that she simply gave up.
Since 2000, the Center has offered students the option to set up appointments online via the corporate website RelayHealth. But Welsh said that the service, which requires students to register with their health insurance information before they can use it, has not been very successful so far.
“We haven’t had many people use it at all,” Welsh said.
Other students said they were dismayed that the Center does not allow walk-ins, telling stories of having to go to the Georgetown University Hospital emergency room instead. Welsh said that this is a misconception on the part of the students.
“We do a lot of walk-ins,” he insisted. He said that it is up to the nurse on duty to decide whether the case is an emergency or whether the student is healthy enough to wait for an appointment when one becomes available.
The Student Health Center is accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and is one of 17 departments of the Georgetown University Hospital. As a result, the Center can accept all forms of insurance instead of just the student health plan offered by the University.
Though there are no specialists in the Center itself, some of the doctors do have “clinical interests” and excel in specified areas of health care. Students that require specialized treatment are referred to the appropriate department at the hospital and are usually seen within a month.
Most students, however, are not so much unsatisfied with treatment as they are with the service. When Dugan could not get an appointment over the phone, he went directly to the Center, where he found two employees and a nearly empty office.
