A Friday night had never been so epic. Enjoying a free wristband snack at Fall Weekend, little could freshman Umar Zulfiqar anticipate he would end up in the ER just a few hours later due to a sudden and severe allergic reaction to shrimp. Come 3 a.m., he was short of breath and playing a waiting game to see if it was a passing trouble. Eventually, he was pushed by his roommate to call Campus Safety, something Zulfiqar had been delaying. One wonders if Zulfiqar would still be hesitant if primary health-care was just a couple of minutes away at the Lillian Warnshuis Health Center.
Why is the Health Center not open on weekends? Why does it have closing hours? Isn’t that like having closing hours on our safety and well-being? Why can I not get access to extended medical care inside Conn? Isn’t my $60,000 enough to get me access to decent healthcare? These are questions I have heard with surprising frequency in my two or so short months at Conn from hordes of belligerent Camels. Curiosity to understand what was really going on, and a shared belligerence, lead me to investigate.
Zulfiqar’s is by no means an uncommon situation. Prapti Kafle ’16 talked about how, in her freshman year, her friend had a shooting pain in her stomach and had to be driven to the ER in the middle of the night. “It cost her some $2,000 just to get a simple blood test done, all because she got it done at a hospital,” reminisced Kafle. Not to mention the alarm that such a situation brings; you never know when you’re going to be spending a night at the hospital instead of your dorm room.
And it’s not just sudden, “that-would-never-happen-to-me” cases. Nam Hoang ’17 came down with flu-like symptoms on the weekend before Fall Break, and played the same waiting game as Zulfiqar. After a draining weekend, he finally got medicine from the Health Center on Monday, and it took him almost the whole week to recover. “I asked them why they weren’t open on weekends,” said Haung, “and they said they used to be…they said something about not wanting to deal with parties and drugs anymore.”
When I probed into the matter, Hoang turned out to be right in some measure: “The decision to close the Health Center came in the academic year 2000-2001, and the center finally closed down in 2001,” said Cate Moffett, director of the Health Center. Up until that year, explained Moffett, the Health Center used to be open 24/7 with physicians and nurses available at all times of the day and night. After financial assessments and a consultation with the American College Health Association (ACHA), who recommended a complete change in the way health services were organized at Conn, an SGA task force working with the Dean’s office finally came to the decision to shorten the hours. Intoxicated students, according to Moffett, were a big part of the reason. She explains how a constant access to health services was leading to a loss of accountability within the campus community. “Students would sometimes just ring the buzzer and dump their drunk friends at our door,” she said. “We had to find a way to try and be health promoters as opposed to a drunk tank.”
The ACHA consultation report revealed other concerns, which Moffett explained. It was, she says, a “very dangerous operation” having just an nurse working at night with no back-up; it was, at the same time, very expensive. The report (that she gave me access to) concurs with her, explaining the shifting trend: “college infirmaries have rapidly disappeared during the past two decades…since modern medicine and new vaccines virtually eliminated on-campus epidemics and improved self care options.” It goes on to say “at this time, the infirmary model has low utilization, is expensive to maintain, difficult to staff and creates serious risk management issues.” The statistics seem to agree: just two other NESCAC schools have 24 hour health care.
A plan was created to “fill the gap,” explained Moffett. “We wanted to make the community more aware about health care, which is why we hired CC Curtis.” Besides Curtis, Area Co-ordinators in Res Life and student EMTs were hired, and Campus Safety was retrained to be able to “make evaluations” as opposed to just dropping students off at the Health Center. A RN Hotline, where students can have access to basic advice about when to go to the ER, was also set up.
This is still not satisfactory for students who have experienced the problems that the absence of the Health Center brings. “They should be open on Saturdays, maybe have something like 9-3 weekend hours. Sundays are when the hangovers happen, after all,” Hoang pointed out. Prapti has an even more aggressive stance. “They should be open 24/7. Healthcare being inaccessible is unacceptable. Have student workers, if it is expensive to have staff. But something needs to be available.” Moffett was advised to hire student workers by the ACHA consultation as well, but never ended up doing it because of privacy concerns.
To arguments like Hoang’s, Moffett says “to delegate a couple of tiny hours on the weekends is a nice icing on the cake…but it’s not like we’re open 16 hours…everyone is never going to be happy with whatever hours we have.” And her reply to Prapti’s argument is even more counter-intuitive: on weekends, it is usually something that can wait till a Monday; if it’s something so serious that it can’t, the Health Center wouldn’t be able to do anything about it even if it was open and you would have to go to the ER.
I think it has more to do with the reassurance of having some sort of safety net on campus than with a reluctance to go to the hospital, and when I mentioned this to Moffett, she agreed. Antibiotics, she suggests, play the same role of instant reassurances. “Getting better from, say, a cold has little to do with the medicine. We don’t want to put ourselves out of business but it’s true,” said Moffet. An overall wellness-based lifestyle is the key.
All these changes were made with the assumption that the campus community is picking up the slack and becoming more health conscious, but is that actually happening? “Students are way more savvy than they were in 2000,” says Moffett. Students who were regulars in their freshman year, she remembers, are telling freshmen what to do about health problems by the time they are seniors. To Moffett, the system seems to be working perfectly. Though I came out of the interview with Moffett feeling decidedly less belligerent, I still have my doubts.
I don’t feel like I’m living on a campus where people are aware about all the resources about health care. “If I don’t get sick, I don’t really care” seems to be the general attitude. The Health Center should do more to remove this kind of blind reliance on help coming whenever a student might end up needing it, because I might just have to drive myself to the hospital with broken ribs at 2 a.m. on a Sunday.
More health awareness workshops in orientation, with student speakers talking about how suddenly they ended up needing health services and how important it is to know about the available resources, along with mandatory health care workshops every semester could add up to be a huge difference in the campus community’s approach towards health services.
Trying some way of having student employees for brief weekend hours (because “everyone” doesn’t need to be pleased, just the students who get mono on a Friday night), or maybe having the EMTs sit in at the Health Center after hours as some kind of a work-study position would help quell the frustration among students enormously. This kind of arrangement doesn’t need to be permanent, just a crutch in place till the campus truly does pick up the slack. Tough love is a good thing, but only up to a certain point. There could be a way to meet halfway, but both the Health Center and the Camels are going to have to walk to get there. •
