A Night Makes a Difference

A recent Crimson article spoke to Harvard’s efforts to increase student wellness, citing the Center of Wellness at Harvard University Health Services, the Workgroup on Student Stress, and many conversations between various advisors within Harvard. Yet the announcement that Harvard’s only 24-hour medical care service, Stillman Infirmary, would be closing next semester suggests the opposite. While Director of University Health Services Paul Barreira stated that no jobs would be lost in the process, the closure of Stillman suggests that even if UHS has its students’ interests in mind, it is making a grave mistake.
Barreira’s decision to close Stillman is based on a recent study UHS conducted, in which the Director found that “overnight urgent-hour services are underutilized.” His justification suggests that medical services in a university should be dictated by demand in the first place. After all, Mount Auburn Hospital, a short drive from campus, is available 24 hours to treat emergency cases, and students can also access UHS during the daytime.
Such an approach to university health care is deeply troubling. Stillman Infirmary provides an important space for students to feel they are being taken care of within the nest of their university, and of course treats the typical symptoms that ail much of the Harvard population on Saturday nights. If Harvard only provides spaces for legitimate emergencies (Mount Auburn Hospital) and mild or chronic illnesses (during the daytime hours of UHS), students will have nowhere to go for cases that are urgent but that they or UHS would not deem “serious enough” or worth the tedious trip to Mount Auburn. Amongst our age group, such ailments would include alcohol sickness and urinary tract infections.
Given the choice to go to Mount Auburn or do nothing, most students will do nothing. A night of doing nothing is enough to exacerbate symptoms, turn benign infections into serious ones, keep cases of sexual assault silent, and give UHS–and more importantly, the students it claims to serve–a much bigger headache.
A night makes a difference. So if what Barreira stated is true, that the move has “nothing to do with University money,” it is unclear why UHS is using a profit-based model to “serve” its students. Health care within the same university that manages to offer acupuncture appointments should not be operating on the logic of marginal benefit. If it does then students, too, will begin to think of our health on the margins. What kind of message is Harvard sending if it can make a shiny buck off of Center for Wellness yoga classes but won’t provide its students safe, convenient, and necessary overnight health service because not “enough” of us are getting sick?