Students advised to go elsewhere as delays mount at UNSW’s Health Service
Appointment wait times have reached nearly 6 weeks, raising questions about the adequacy of UNSW’s student support services.
Over the past few weeks, Noise@UNSW has received multiple reports from students seeking medical attention at the UNSW Health Service (located on the Quad) that receptionists are advising students requiring non-urgent care to go elsewhere. Reports include claims that they have mentioned being “fully booked” and dealing with “crashed computer systems” when serving students.
Upon reaching out to the Health Service for a statement they responded, “We pride ourselves on being a bulk billing clinic for students, which is rare to find these days. We run an appointment-based clinic and we see an average of over 200 patients per day.”
“We do reserve a limited number of spots for on-the-day appointments/walk-ins. There are times when the patient load exceeds our capacity, and once those spots are taken it can be difficult to juggle our capacity to fit non-urgent appointments into our roster. This is in order for the GPs to be able to practice safe, quality medicine.”
“In these cases, the safest option is for us to recommend seeing a GP elsewhere when we do not have capacity, so the patient can have access to the medical care they need. It is important to recognise though that we do not turn away on the day walk-in students who require urgent medical support.”
“Like any other workplace, there are times when we have staffing shortages/GP’s become ill last minute and are unable to work.”
Calculated using the current information available on the Health Service’s HotDoc online booking platform, the average length of time between this article’s date of publishing and an individual GP’s earliest available standard-length appointment is almost 19 days, with some practitioners unavailable for booking as far as 40 days (nearly 6 weeks) from now.
Regular patients of the Health Service have reported that this mass unavailability has had adverse effects on their health due to an inability to access timely appointments with their Primary Care Providers (PCPs). Being unable to reach doctors who are familiar with their specific medical background (critical for those with complex health histories), has created challenges for patients of the Health Service when it comes to obtaining refills of essential prescription medications and specialist referrals, alongside punctual care for acute illness.
According to UNSW’s SSAF allocation data from 2022, UNSW health services (including the clinic, Mental Health Connect, optometry, and others) receive approximately 17000 students annually, while operating on a budget of just shy of 2 million dollars (by contrast, UNSW provided over 5 million dollars to Arc in 2022 for “Clubs or other associations”).
