Students and Health Care

How do students deal with health care on campus?

As a glasses-wearing, health-conscious female student at CU, health care ranks pretty high on my list of concerns. The more I thought about the topic, the more questions and ideas I had. These are a few of the angles I'd be curious enough to read an article about, so they'd likely be interesting enough to write about.

Angle 1. How do health care quality and options compare at different campuses across the country? Factors to compare would be price of prescriptions, services offered, kinds of outreach programs and practitioner-to-student ratio, among others. The article would be mostly an impact piece, letting students know how their level of care stacks up against that of other students. Sidebar information could include information about Wardenburg Health Center and the services they offer, along with telephone numbers for each department. The story could be more focused, dealing with one aspect of care. The price of birth control, for example, varies widely across the country. This fact alone suggests varying policies toward women's health care and could work as a starting point for a deeper inquiry.

Angle 2. Like most services in Boulder, Wardenburg sees a huge rise in activity at the beginning of the fall semester. One way to get a view of how these students, especially freshman, handle health care and medical choices is to interview doctors and nurses at Wardenburg and paint a composite picture of what the health center does in a day.

Angle 3. Boulder supports a range of holistic and alternative medicines. How popular is alternative medicine among CU students? How do they use alternative medicine? What are the recent trends in this type of care? Interviewing patients and practitioners of alternative medicine would give the piece a human interest angle.

Angle 4. The most fashion-conscious area of student health care is optical care. This story could be approached from a trend/fashion angle and include photos of the latest styles, quotes from students, and advice on choosing a comfortable, attractive pair. Alternatively, the story could address more serious concerns, such as how much people really know about their eyes, what they should look for in an optician, and how to care for their eyes.

Angle 5. New medicines and vaccines are hitting the market regularly, and one of the most exciting is the HPV vaccine available for female students free of charge at CU. This would be an information/impact piece telling people about the vaccine, the disease it protects against, and who should get it. Because it is a relatively new vaccine and protects against a disease known to cause certain forms of cancer, the topic is timely and important.