Although the McCosh Health Center is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for students who require inpatient care or emergency services, the window of time in which students can schedule appointments to meet with a physician or practitioner concerning illnesses less severe than urgent is rather narrower. The Health Center offers close to 50 hours a week during which students may set up appointments via phone call. However, the particular 50 hours offered tend to fall at times inconvenient for a student schedule, which is unfortunate given that McCosh’s services are aimed primarily at students. Consequently, we urge the University to adjust them.
Currently, the Health Center allows students to make appointments for non-urgent primary medical care from 8:45 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, and from 10:15 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. on Tuesdays. Unfortunately, these hours correspond precisely with student class times. For many students, especially those taking a heavy course load or those with multiple laboratory classes, it can be rather challenging to find a workable time to set up an appointment. Indeed, students would most likely want to schedule appointments during the hours the Health Center is almost entirely closed to them; namely, after 4:30, when almost all classes have already met for the day, and on the weekends. The hours for specialty doctors like the OB/GYN are even more limited. That the appointment times available are not those most desirable is problematic, but also easily remediable.
We recognize, of course, that the times currently in place constitute typical workday hours, and that while making changes to these hours might be more convenient for students, it may be less so for employees. Nevertheless, appointment availability could easily be made more accessible with only slight disruption to the current schedule. One possibility is to shift the hours back a couple of days a week so that on those days appointments would start around 10 or 11 a.m. and end around 6 or 7 p.m. This way the schedule could accommodate both students who have no problem with the current schedule and those for whom it is problematic, without burdening employees or presenting a financial challenge to the University. Or, the University could have doctors and nurses work in staggered shifts, so that there would be some appointments available both early in the morning before most classes start and in the afternoon after they end. In particular, those doctors who are only available for a few hours a week could vary their hours week to week in order to increase student accessibility.
In addition to altering appointment hours, the University could further improve on current procedures by instituting an appointment scheduling system online rather than having appointments set up by phone call. This way, students could easily see what appointment times are available and plan accordingly. These changes would make the McCosh Health Center more accessible for all at little cost.
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