Student Health Services | EP6

Dr. David Jones: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of the Minnesota State University family orientation podcast. I'm thrilled that you're continuing to listen to these, and we have a, another exciting episode for you. We are recording this on June 7th. 2021. I shared that date just so you can reference this is what we know when we talk about reference any COVID information or pandemic related information, and that is particularly important today for today's guest.

I'm joined by Dr. Wendy Schuh she's our director of student health services. And couldn't be more thrilled for the work that she's been doing for many years, but especially during the pandemic. And we'll ask her to share a little bit more about that, but to start us off, Wendy how long have you been at MSU and what do you like about working here?

Dr. Wendy Schuh: [00:00:52] Yeah, thanks for having me. Gosh, I have been here since 2001, so I am coming up on 20 years in August that I've been here. My role has changed a little bit from a Health Educator to Associate Director to the Director. Now, for the past 10 years, I've been in this role working here and, you know, really with those transitions in the positions to.

I have changed my role a little bit as far as some of that direct student interaction. To working a little bit more at an administrative level. But so those, that balance, those two opportunities have really been fun to see both sides of it. And I would probably say that's something I've enjoyed.

I would imagine. , so student health services, obviously you're full service student health center. You want to share, is this a little bit? What's it? What's that include? Yeah. So student health services is comprised of a medical clinic, a pharmacy. a laboratory and health education services. And so for people to know that all of these are available within our medical clinic.

A lot of times I'll just say, you know, stop in you know, stop by and poke your head in. And they'll say, Oh my gosh this looks like a real doctor's office. And that can be a surprise to people because you know what a student health services means can vary. According to where you're looking. And as you said, we're a full service facility within our medical clinic, we have three physicians and three nurse practitioners that are on staff.

We're open every day that classes are in session. We have a nurse line that students or parents can call if they have questions about whether this warrants a visit, whether you know, this is a visit that can be seen at health services, as well as the pharmacy that you know, students can use whether or not they use our healthcare providers, they can use the pharmacy just like they would a, a corner pharmacy.

So stop in and get some. Tylenol cold tablets toothbrush things that they may need replaced things that they weren't planning on needing. We talk about prepping, preparing for students to come to college and getting those supplies. Well, Hey, if you forget something, if you need a thermometer, if you need some , fever, reducing medication, you can stop down to that pharmacy and get some of those supplies as well.

And then with the laboratory you know, if they have. Visits through our health service, or even if they need regular lab work that their home doctor is requesting. They get, we can work with them on that also. So really a variety of ways. A lot of people will say, Oh, I just assumed I would use the health service when I couldn't get home to my provider.

Completely appropriate. But what we find is about 75% of the students who use us, consider us their primary care, like yep. I see Toya when I go to college because that's my doctor, that's my healthcare provider while I'm. I'm at MSU and then the last thing is the health education services.

So we have a lot of prevention, education including substance abuse and healthy sexuality and stress and sleep and nutrition. That do programming around campus. And so that's great to get into the classrooms to get onto residence hall floors, but it's also a volunteer opportunity for students that may have been involved in something like this in high school that may be looking at going into a healthcare career that want to get that experience.

So that's kind of a cool thing for students to know about also that they can get involved in the health pros. Wow. That's a lot going on. At least that's impressive. Well then I think it's one of the great strengths of our size university that we have that kind of resource, you know, for over 14,000 students, if they can lean heavily upon it.

So with all those resources and such. And from looking back from last March, you know, clearly the pandemic started changing the work we did at the university. And how did it impact student health and how did you respond during the pandemic? Yes, it's certainly affected our work as well. We had to make some difficult decisions and more staff meetings than probably most people cared to attend, but we really got into the.

To the heart of, okay, what do we need to do? You know, what student health services needs to provide care to our students? So we stayed open last spring and continue to be onsite providing healthcare as well as made some changes. Like you said, because of COVID. Some of those changes included serving our students when they couldn't physically get into health services.

So telehealth visits were incorporated. We did have the benefit of having already had some tele-health visits. That we offered mostly for, for mental health. And so to have those policies and procedures in place allowed us to pretty seamlessly expand those appointment reasons. I know a lot of places sort of had to make that plunge and we were fortunate to be able to do that pretty seamlessly.

So all of our providers offer telehealth visits if students had either moved away from campus, if they were ill and were under quarantine or isolation, And so a lot of those appointments for that continuity of care, like you need to continue to get you know, birth control filled and you need to continue to get, you know, ongoing prescriptions figured out.

And so we were able to do that. We also made some changes with our pharmacy. So they began offering mail order options for people who were already regular customers that were getting their prescriptions filled that then needed to get that sent home. So we offered some some mail order options with the pharmacy.

We, uh, Implemented sort of a separate physical space. So we were still all student health services, but we opened a separate upper clinic is what we call that. That was really serving students who may have had. Any sort of COVID symptoms, which as we experienced, they were adding new COVID symptoms weekly for a while there.

And it went from respiratory to you know, eyes to GI issues. There were all sorts of things that we were trying to keep up on. So we could continue to see people who had symptoms that were related to COVID in this separate physical space. And so that was something that we worked with our environmental health and safety with residential life.

So we could continue to work out of the same building yet keep our well students well and see our sick students.

That's a lot again it can't imagine having to stand up a whole new facility doing this and everything, but you made the reference to telehealth and tele-mental health and you are quite the leader within the state. Can you describe a little bit of what you provide support for a lot of colleges, universities beyond just Minnesota state Mankato?