Amid continuous updates to the student health center, Campus Care is still unable to meet certain needs of students seeking its services.
Though Tonya Burdette, director at Campus Care, said the center will see all students who come to visit a provider, there are several conditions and needs the facility is not equipped to treat.
Students are most often referred to services outside the facility for treatment that would require orthopedic care, according to Campus Care records. Dermatology is the second-most requested treatment that has students seeking treatment elsewhere, followed by physical therapy, although Ohio University Physical Therapy can administer the latter in Hudson Hall.
“We don’t turn students away,” Burdette said. “We see them, and if they need something outside the scope of our practice, we turn them out.”
Ohio State University’s Wilce Student Health Center, on the other hand, offers several services not available at Campus Care, including physical therapy, sports medicine and the two most student-requested services at OSU — optometry and dentistry, said James Jacobs, director of student health services at OSU.
“They are 100 percent booked all the time,” Jacobs said of the optometry and dentistry services offered at the health center.
Jacobs added that OSU does have more of an incentive to provide a broader range of services to students because of the nature of the population it serves.
“The scope of services that we offer is a product of both the size of our population and our proximity to our medical center,” he said. “And the fact that we’re a fee-for-service, we basically function like a private practice doctor’s office.”
The three-and-a-half story health center also offers services similar to Campus Care, including an allergist, HPV vaccinations, an X-ray and gynecological services.
“We never turn people away,” Jacobs said. “The goal is, we’re going to see them, and if the physician who sees them thinks they need a service or a test that is not available here, then we would refer them to the available place to have that done.”
John Kemerer, medical director of Campus Care, echoed Jacobs’ sentiments regarding the correlation between the size of the school and the number of services that can be realistically offered to students.
“For the size of the university, it’s quite expensive compared to a lot, because, you know, we’re not 60,000 students like OSU, so we can’t have all this stuff like OSU has,” he said. “For the size of the university, I think our services are quite extensive, really.”
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