2019 Gumbo final - Book - Page 35
Pharmacy Closure
LSU Student Health Center ends its services
everal cubicles and a conference room sit in the LSU Student
Health Center where University students once could fill
their prescriptions. The Pharmacy at LSU was a full-service
pharmacy that offered over-the-counter and prescription
drugs, vaccines and more. Many students were not aware of the Student
Health Center’s on-campus pharmacy before it closed in the spring of
2018. The pharmacy closure is due to financial instability, but the students
who depended on it worry about the decision to close.
Graduate student Sydney Epps said she is concerned about the
pharmacy’s closure because of the new on-campus living requirement for
all freshman students starting this year.
“[These students] should be able to access all the facets of health and
wellness on campus,” Epps said.
Although students new to campus this year don’t know about the
pharmacy, Epps said there’s a “remarkably large populous” of graduate,
non-traditional and international students who were especially dependent
on on-campus medical resources like the Student Health Center’s pharmacy.
The Student Health Center converted the space previously occupied
by the pharmacy to a cubicle-style office space for six employees and a
conference room, Morris said.
SG also received feedback from about 50 to 100 students toward the end
of the spring 2018 semester, according to SG executive press secretary
CJ Carver. After receiving emails from students asking SG to intervene
in the pharmacy’s closure, Carver said he reached out to the previous
administration, but they didn’t have any involvement with the decision to
close the pharmacy. SG president Stewart Lockett then contacted Morris.
Now, the lack of a pharmacy slows the process of students’ access to
medical resources, especially those who might have transportation
andlanguage barriers that already make medical care difficult, Epps said.
“Following the Student Health Center’s decision to close the in-house
pharmacy, Student Government received concern from students over the
closure and our involvement in it,” Carver said in a press release. “After
discussing the closure with the executive director of the Student Health
Center, D’Ann Morris, the timeline shows Student Government had no
involvement in this decision.”
“It was much more convenient to just walk across campus than having to
drive to a CVS or another pharmacy,” Epps said.
Morris said most doctor’s offices and clinics don’t have an in-house
pharmacy and that pharmacies are not necessary for medical diagnoses.
After the pharmacy announced its closure, Epps began collecting
notecards with student feedback about the pharmacy’s closure. She
posted a box outside of her office door for students to leave comments,
and she received about 120 student opinions that she passed on to LSU
Student Government.
Speaker of the student senate Christina Black said she hasn’t heard much
from students directly because several students didn’t know the pharmacy
existed. She said several of the students she asked about the pharmacy
said they prefer to use the CVS and Walgreens pharmacies off-campus.
Moving forward, Carver said SG will continue to work with the Student
Health Center to provide students with the necessary resources. Black also
said the student senate is open to working with the Student Health Center.
Before the pharmacy closed, students could see a doctor, get a
prescription and immediately have it filled in-house, Epps said.
“It was a one-stop shop,” Epps said. “It was amazing. It was a great idea,
and I think it was very well-celebrated when it first opened.”
The LSU Student Health Center Pharmacy closes and new
office spaces are constructed on Tuesday, Sept. 4th, 2018.
Keystone Pharmacy Services, the private company operating the oncampus pharmacy, closed the business and ended their lease early
due to a lack of usage, according to Student Health Center executive
director D’Ann Morris. The company took over the pharmacy in 2016 after
the Student Health Center determined the 25-year-old self-operating
pharmacy wasn’t financially stable enough to remain open.
“The LSU community is opting to use pharmacies off-campus rather than
on-campus,” Morris said in an email. “It is as simple as that. That’s why the
self-op closed. The private venture failed because there wasn’t enough
business to keep it open.”
Morris said the self-operating pharmacy began losing money around 201112 due to low usage and issues with health insurance.
“In the Student Health Center, we believed in the value of the pharmacy,
but could not sustain the cost by using student fee money to subsidize it,”
Morris said in an email. “We need to be good stewards of [students’] money.”
Story // Sheridan Wall
Photo // Bella Biondini
Design // Dakota Baños
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