After years of planning, the John C. Longest Student Health Center has broken ground to renovate their existing building and to add an additional three-story building. “We are making these change in an attempt to improve the access of the building, patient confidentiality, the pharmacy, a space for student health records, health education and increase the number of exam rooms by 50 percent,” said Bill Broyles, assistant to vice president of student affairs. “In addition to these changes, the new building will have sick-patient waiting rooms and well-patient waiting rooms.”
The health center recorded 34,325 patient visits in 1986, a record number at the time until last year’s 47, 894 visits.
“That’s a substantial increase in patients and we’re doing our best to accommodate them with our facilities,” Broyles said.
The main level of the new building will consist of a waiting room, medical records, business office, and pharmacy, all of which will serve as “the public area of the building.” Also, on the same floor will be the emergency rooms, clinics and sick-patient exam rooms. Annual visits such as annual checkups will be conducted on the third floor of the new building. The third floor will also have a well-patient waiting room, doctors’ offices, exam rooms and health education offices.
“Right now we have students wandering the halls not quite sure where they are supposed to go and the confidentiality is not as good as we would like,” Broyles said. “In the new building, clinic visits will be much more private and there will be more control as to the access of the clinic.”
Currently the Health Center does not have the space for health education but that too will change with the new building. The new space will allow for one- on-one counseling with the registered dietitian and two nutrition graduate assistants on staff. Broyles said the Health Center works very closely with the MSU Counseling Center but does more counseling in the area of nutrition counseling as opposed to psychological counseling at the Counseling Center.
Other minor additions will be a larger shot room, a number of nurses’ stations throughout the building and a covered drive- through to make it easier to drop off sick patients.
“We want to provide the best way for sick individuals to enter our facilities,” Broyles said.
As the Health Center adjusts to these external changes until completion, they must also adapt to internal changes occurring with the staff. Today, two doctors will be leaving: one’s on maternity leave and the other is relocating. Dr. Sheila Crowley will be on maternity leave until January while Dr. Mike McIntire is relocating his practice to Tuscaloosa, Ala.
“We are actively recruiting a replacement for him and have several candidates for the position,” Broyles said. “We are going to bring in part-time nurse practitioners and maybe an additional doctor to cover the understaffing issue.”
Nurse Administrator Ella Frese at the Health Center said that the staff is all concerned that we maintain acute care of the patients, and the staff is asking students to schedule and keep appointments.
“We are doing the best we can with the staff we have, and we hope everyone will cooperate and understand,” Frese said.
Broyles said the process of checking references is a very intensive process and is very time consuming but the Health Center is doing what they can to be efficient in resolving these issues.
“We are not going to compromise quality when selecting doctors for our students, and we will replace him as soon as we find the right person,” Broyles said.
An additional change to the Health Center during the construction is a new policy requiring appointments instead of the walk-ins. In order to see a doctor, patients must call or go into the Health Center to make an appointment. The waiting room is not accessible while the construction is under way so instead there is a hallway where patients can wait to make an appointment.
“This allows us to even out the appointments throughout the day so that we can be more efficient,” Broyles said.
Some students think otherwise.
“I would so much rather walk in than have to set up an appointment,” MSU student Harper Kurtz said.
MSU senior Nathan Moore says he would guess from the staff’s perspective appointments would be much easier but from his point of view, he would rather walk-in and see a doctor if he was feeling sick. Junior Ragan Stout visited the Health Center on more than one occasion last year while working with small children at a day care center. She remembers always waiting for a long period of time to see a doctor when it was set up for walk-in patients, especially during flu season.
“The appointment system is good on the one side that you don’t have to wait for hours on end but it’s also bad because during flu season it’ll be so busy you can’t get an appointment with a doctor,” Stout said.
Before the construction, doctor’s visits were conducted on a first-come first-serve basis sometimes making students wait for hours for an appointment. The plan was to make it by appointment only during the period of the renovation and addition and then resume the walk-in policy. However, Boyles said from what he has heard, more students have preferred the appointment system.
“You know the staff loves the appointment system,” Broyles said. “It helps them out tremendously.”
If the students and staff continue to prefer the appointment system, it will be continued after construction is completed.
Another minor change in policy is the suspension of physical examinations for non-students until the completion of the renovations.
The construction of the new building is to be completed in December and the renovations of the existing building will be completed in March.
“We will move into the new building over the holiday break and then we’ll be 100 percent complete in March,” Broyles said. “I am very much looking forward to this part being over-it will have been a year in the process until completion by that time.”
Broyles said he is pleased with the progress they are making and impressed with the contractors’ first class job on the Health Center.
Broyles said when he was in school at MSU, the third floor of the Health Center was an in-patient facility. Those rooms were later converted to exam rooms. “The Health Center has continued to grow and has definitely needed these changes for a while,” Broyles said.
“We’ve known we would add on for a long time now but this just so happened to be the time to do it,” Broyles said. “We financed it through a bond issue and went through a number of steps to get it going. It has taken years of planning to get to the point where we are now.”
The Health Center has itemized all of the critical needs in order for the architectural firm to address and correct the current problems. Broyles said he doesn’t know of any problems that won’t be corrected with these changes and adds that he hopes this is it since there’s no more room to expand after these additions are complete.
“I think it’ll be easier for patients to get to the Health Center, more comfortable for them to wait, a better pharmacy for them to get prescriptions filled and overall a great improvement,” Broyles said. “We are committed to providing the highest quality health care to our patients and we are not going to compromise that by any means.”
The hours of the Health Center are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday 8 a.m.-5 p.m. and Thursday 9 a.m.-5 p.m. If there is a medical concern or emergency situation during off-hours, call the Health Center 325-2431 and press 1 for an emergency to be connected to the Oktibbeha County Hospital emergency room or press 2 to speak with a registered nurse as part of Nurse Link services.