Campus Care’s wait times keep many students at a safe distance from the student health center, even prodding them to visit alternative care facilities.
Although the wait times have sometimes lasted hours, renovations completed in the winter came packaged with a goal to decrease the average wait time to a maximum of 45 minutes.
Wait times for September — before the renovations were completed — exceeded the 45-minute goal with an average wait time of 2 hours, 17 minutes. The center saw 2,441 patients that month, according to Campus Care records.
In November, 1,267 patients visited the center with an average wait time of 1 hour, 37 minutes.
“The primary driver behind (those wait times) was that we had the construction going on,” said Steven Davies, the chief executive officer at University Medical Associates.
Eric Minon, a sophomore studying nursing, said he has paid several visits to the center, usually with a wait time of less than five minutes. However, Minon said an April trip to the center led him to seek care at Holzer Clinic.
“There was this one time where the wait time was three hours,” Minon said. “I just left and went to (Holzer).”
Brandon Dohner, a junior studying digital media, said he has never experienced an unreasonable wait time, waiting 20 minutes at most.
Renovations to the center finished in December, just before Winter Quarter began.
Davies said the renovations were originally slated for completion before Fall Quarter and that the prolonged construction to the center contributed to the lengthy wait times.
“Once we expanded out into the space, we could see significantly lower wait times, though,” Davies said.
In January, the center saw about 1,907 patients with an average wait time of 50 minutes.
“We would hope that we can continue to improve upon our wait times,” Davies said. “That’s one of the largest historical complaints that we’ve seen, but we’re making strides now.”
One floor up, Counseling and Psychological Services, which might soon be experiencing renovations of its own, has made its own alterations to lower wait times.
Fred Weiner, director of Counseling and Psychological Services, said that during an average week a person might not be seen because he or she has to leave for a class and cannot endure the wait time.
“In terms of how long someone has to sit there in the waiting area, we don’t have those statistics,” Weiner said.
He added that the department works to mitigate the wait time by calling in additional counselors when there are at least three people waiting to be seen.
“People don’t sit there for an hour,” he said. “You know, I would say, anecdotally speaking, probably maybe the longest is a half hour.”
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