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In an email last Friday, Student Health Services announced it would move to an appointment-based medical visit scheduling system in an effort to reduce the time patients spend in the waiting room.
SHS Director David McBride said in the email to the student body that student feedback had encouraged the staff to revisit the merits of allowing students to make medical appointments in advance.
‘We have measured waiting time and know that our students who make an appointment in advance have an average wait time of 15 minutes versus 25 minutes for those who walk in without an appointment,’ McBride said in the email.
The new policy for appointments will book 60 percent of appointments as ‘same day appointments,’ which can be made by calling SHS prior to the visit. If a student chooses to be a ‘walk-in,’ they will be booked into the next available timeslot.
The other 40 percent of appointments will be pre-booked up to three days before the day of the student’s appointment.
‘They’re always going to deal with walk-ins,’ Boston University spokesman Colin Riley said. ‘Student Health gets about 40,000 walk-in visits a year, so the large numbers can make waiting stressful and inconvenient for students.’
He said it makes sense for SHS to rearrange things a bit and to use new technology to improve students’ experiences.
‘It’s a continuing thing to improve customer service and rooms for patients,’ Riley said. ‘Students just need to remember with appointment-based visits, it is about keeping the schedule. It will be like any other routine appointment, like going to the dentist, and it will hopefully go over well.’
McBride said in his email the new policy ‘will not entirely remove wait time,’ but it aims to help the health center run more efficiently.
Some students said they were not in favor of the new policy, and were unsure of what the changes would mean for their future visits.
‘It limits your appointments,’ Shannon Kiang, a College of Arts and Sciences freshman, said. ‘It controls it. . . . It gets rid of the whole ‘always there for you’ aspect that they promise.’
Despite the email’s mention of providing care for urgent matters in an ‘immediate fashion,’ College of General Studies freshman Lauren Barry said she did not expect it would be so easy under the new system.
‘I’m not a big fan of that policy,’ she said. ‘You can never expect when you will get sick and you need immediate care.’
CAS sophomore Chase Syms noted while ‘online scheduling might help more’ with getting into SHS on short notice, he believes there must be more restructuring to completely alleviate the issues.
‘I think this is only a small solution and it probably won’t make waiting much shorter at all,’ he said. ‘I guess I do worry about not getting in if I was really sick but couldn’t get in without an appointment.’
Staff writer Saba Hamedy contributed reporting to this article.
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