Seasons come, and seasons go: flu season, cold season, and even final exam season. All of these are times where students fall ill more quickly and stay sick longer. Stress levels rise and immune systems fail. To thwart the inevitable, student health centers must be a top priority.

College campuses are ideal breeding grounds for disease. Students are all cramped into tight quarters, forced to share bathrooms, and are in constant contact with one another.When the swine flu frenzy began, news channels aired footage of college campuses across the country. Because of our living conditions, college students were ranked in the same threat level group as babies and as the elderly. This wasn’t just a coincidence.

Because of these realities, student health centers on college campuses must be a top priority. Expectations should be exceeded and this basic service should be implemented to the best of every college’s means.

At Guilford, more should be done to revamp the student health center. Here are the facts.

Our student health center is open from 9-4, Monday through Friday. If a student seeks medical attention outside of these designated times, then they have to go to an urgent care center or one of the surrounding hospitals.

The director of student health, Helen Rice, is the only full-time member of the student health center, which consults, evaluates, diagnoses, and treats students. The only additional aid comes from a physician’s assistant who comes to campus nine hours each week.

Essentially, this means that for the 1,475 traditional students on campus, there is only one steady employee to address health concerns. Even with the physician’s assistant, there are only two individuals responsible for diagnosing and treating almost 1,500 people.

This kind of discrepancy is unacceptable. The ratio of health service provided to students is both absurd and unfair to the student health center and Guilford students. Because there are such limited resources, mistakes and misdiagnoses are much more likely to slip through the cracks.

My experience with the student health center was unfortunate.

About two months ago, I was misdiagnosed at the student health center. What they believed to be poison ivy was later deemed by my own physician to be a particularly bad case of shingles. Because I was not treated properly, I now have scars on my legs.

I did not choose to write this article to bemoan my own experience, but rather to shine light on how the lack of resources, limited hours, and small staff can lead to damaging results.

Students deserve more options, especially since many are unable to easily journey off campus to receive medical care. Guilford needs to more adeptly serve the health needs of its students.

Perhaps rather than focusing our attentions on new projects around campus, more time should be spent improving essential the quality of essential services, namely the student health center.

If and when mistakes occur, they should be pondered, and then solved. One can hardly expect ideal outcomes when the health center seems to be short of both time and qualified employees.

The student health center has been an asset to the campus in many regards, and they did not waste a moment setting up sanitizing stations throughout campus and offering H1N1 vaccines. But only so much can be accomplished with so few resources at their disposal.

An exceptional student health service is a fundamental element in maintaining an active, involved, and dedicated campus community. To preserve this, no cost can be too high.