While the specifics aren’t as clear as they could be, the Thomson Student Health Center seems to be making pretty large changes about how students receive healthcare on campus.
The big plan is to have a designated “primary care provider” (a physician or nurse practitioner) for each student. This care provider will work with your personal “care team” made up of health-related personnel in other fields (including counselors, nutritionists, wellness professionals and the like).
Theoretically, this allows physicians to branch into other areas while performing a simple check-up on a student. Potential topics like mental or sexual health are fair game for any doctor attending to a student who walks in with the common cold.
The potential upsides are apparent. Having a personal physician who can get to know you is an expedient change. And having access to many different health areas through one person could also be helpful if you don’t know exactly what your problem might be.
Nonetheless, the information we have about this change is still much too sparse to form an informed opinion.
The Student Health Center has not told us about how long this change is going to take or the nature of the consultation between primary care providers and members of the “care team.”
What this development seems to say is that students can expect an experience more like visiting a regular physician or family doctor than going to the ER.
While this may be a good change in theory, the fact is that students treat the health center like an ER — we only use it as a last resort. We stock up on DayQuil and chicken noodle soup and call our parents in lieu of seeing a readily available, trained professional on campus.
The big challenge inherent in the new health system change is to shift student behavior from visiting the health center in extreme situations to planning regular visits.
Having a personal physician, someone who has treated you before and knows your medical history to some extent, is a great experience and is useful for your long-term health.
But we believe it's up to the students to change their behavior to accommodate for a “regular physician” system, and it’s up to the health center to help facilitate this change however it can.