Those gaieties writers who used to pen jokes about bare-bones Cowell Student Health Center may have to find a new target. The new Allene G. Vaden Health Center, which opened fall quarter, is a fairly state-of-the-art place. Examination tables can morph into beds comfortable enough to sleep on. Physicians use computed radiography to diagnose fractures in minutes. Several lavatories come equipped with showers where downed cyclists can hose off road-rash gravel.
The two-story, $9.6 million, 30,000-square-foot building not only replaces the 36-year-old Cowell Student Health Center, but also spruces up Campus Drive with its flowering gardens and redwood, fig and olive trees. It sits across Cowell Lane from the former health center, in a portion of the parking lot that serves the Cowell Cluster residences. The old Cowell site has been turned into, well, a parking lot.
On a recent, typically busy Friday afternoon, more than 40 bike racks were filled outside; but inside Vaden, few students were apparent. They might have been seeing mental health professionals, picking up prescriptions or getting anonymous HIV testing. “We’ve definitely created more privacy for students,” says director Ira Friedman. “I don’t think people were aware of what the deficiencies were at Cowell because we had painted it up in recent years.”
Instead of banging into overhead pipes in the basement of Cowell, students being treated for recreational injuries or back strain can now do their stretches in the spacious second-floor physical therapy suite. Anyone arriving with a deep cut is ushered into one of two treatment rooms specially outfitted for suturing lacerations.
The improvements are not just physical. Incoming students filed their medical paperwork online for the first time in June, and within months, the center will unveil a website allowing doctors and patients to correspond confidentially. “What’s really cool,” Friedman says, “is that I can look at X-ray images on the web browser in my office.” High-tech medicine, indeed.
