By Aidan McCann and Kadin Oliva, Reporters
Neighborcare may have only opened its Vashon clinic a year ago, but it now has a separate clinic here at VHS with a fully licensed nurse practitioner.
Neighborcare will have the ability to give physical checkups, birth control and necessary medications to students in need. Families interested in the clinic will have the ability to sign up whether they have health insurance or not, and after that the student is free to go in whenever they want.
Neighborcare was prompted to integrate a clinic into the school because of high anxiety and depression rates in the past few years at our school.
“There’s just a really high need here,” Stephanie Keller said. Keller is the general manager at the VHS Neighborcare Clinic.
Keller believes that the new Neighborcare clinic will greatly improve the emotional state of the students. While she says that there aren’t very many students coming in without an appointment to the current office location, she thinks the amount of appointments scheduled will increase once the clinic moves to its new permanent space.
“[The Neighborcare clinic is] in the main office currently, which is not ideal, but it’s working for now,” Guidance Counselor Tara Vanselow said. “In order for it to be confidential, they’d want it to be a separate space.”
Currently, students must ask the office managers to go in and see the nurse, but that will not be the case once Neighborcare moves the clinic setup to its own dedicated room in early January, 2018. The clinic will move to room 1205, where English and Drama teacher Dr. Stephen Floyd once taught and Nicky Wilks currently teaches.
The clinic’s three current rooms serve different purposes and are all located in the main office. One room is for mental health consulting and hosts Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker Anna Waldman.
The second room is similar to a doctor’s office. There is currently one Registered Nurse (RN) and one RN-in-training.
There is also a main office — separate from the school’s main office — where all paperwork and scheduling is handled.
The RNs in the clinic and the school nurse are different. In the school nurse’s office, a student’s parents may be contacted, whereas in the clinic, what happens is confidential. The school nurse can’t prescribe a student medications. She can diagnose what’s wrong but can’t prescribe anything.
The school nurse must call a student’s parents whenever they come in, but the Neighborcare nurse has an obligation to keep confidential any student’s reason for coming in if they so choose.
“You have the right to receive confidential health care,” Vanselow said.
If anything serious were to occur such as a broken bone, early warnings of self-harm or anything that were to affect the long-term well-being of a student, then the school would be required to inform that student’s parents.
The clinic is also able to give physical check ups, a more convenient option for student athletes. Instead of having to take a half-day off of school, the student may only miss half a period.
“We can say all clear,” Keller said, regarding student injuries.
Keller believes that through the help of the clinic, many athletes will be back to playing after injuries quicker than before.
Keller was adamant that the clinic would help students. She agrees with Vanselow that many students don’t feel comfortable talking to their parents about birth control or mental health check ups. With the Neighborcare clinic, students don’t need to be registered by their parents to get a check up or to receive birth control.