Cal Poly Campus Health and Wellbeing providers are working overtime to lessen student wait times 

At one point in time, Cal Poly's Campus Health and Wellbeing had to turn students away because it didn't have the capacity to serve everyone. Now, its medical providers are working overtime to ensure that every student who comes in is cared for.

Students are reaping the benefits of better campus health care after the university increased health fees in 2018. With the extra funding, Cal Poly hoped to shorten wait times and expand its areas of care.

click to enlarge

• Photo By Libbey Hanson
• FOR THE STUDENTS Cal Poly Campus Health and Wellbeing used to have to turn students away due to understaffing. After the university increased student health fees, conditions seemed to improve, but medical providers are working overtime to ensure each student can be seen.

Part of that deal was to hire more medical providers, and in the early days, things seemed to be improving. But now, current workers said they are burned out and frustrated, working overtime while they wait for the administration to fulfill its promise.

One Campus Health and Wellbeing medical provider, who wished to remain anonymous, said she does the work because she loves the students.

"The problem is that the medical staff is now putting in, on average, one to two extra full hours of work every day beyond their normal work hours," she said. "And so, we've made up that difference on such a regular basis now for so long, thinking initially it was going to be temporary, and [administration] is hiring, but then it keeps happening, and they never fully staff us."

Before the new health fees were implemented, Campus Health and Wellbeing was understaffed, and it also had an average wait time of two to three hours.

Retired Family Medical Physician Dr. Gregory Thomas worked at the clinic from 2008 to 2020. He said that he not only experienced burnout but had to grapple with the fact that they didn't have enough hands on deck to see all the students in need of care.

"You want to make sure that you're doing a good job," he said. "The downside of not doing a good job is it can always be catastrophic."

In the years Thomas worked at the clinic, he said students would often wait hours to be seen, or even a week to make an appointment with one of its 14 medical providers at the time.

"We would sometimes be turning patient students away who probably should have been seen," he said. "They were waiting a long time to be seen in the walk-in clinic, or if they didn't have an immediate, urgent problem, they'd be given an appointment down the road—a week or something like that—and sometimes that was too long," Thomas said.

A Mustang News story from 2017 reported on a student who nearly died of bacterial meningitis that year and got to an emergency room in the nick of time after not being able to be seen by Campus Health and Wellbeing.

"We had nurses working in triage, and they would talk to students who walked in for an appointment to be seen. And sometimes everything was so loaded with patients that we didn't have the capacity to see them that day," Thomas told New Times.

So in 2017, the university raised its quarterly student health fees by $99 in an effort to employ more medical and counseling staff and lessen those hours-long wait times.

According to Cal Poly's estimated fees for the 2017-18 academic year, students were paying $105 per quarter for health services. After the fee increase by fall 2018, student health fees were about $612 per year, and it has increased by 4 percent each year. In 2025-26, student health fees are $271.92 per quarter—or about $1,090 per year if they attended summer quarter as well.

Thomas told New Times that in 2019, the university fulfilled its promise to provide more help at the clinic by hiring three more medical staff.

"It definitely took the pressure off, and we were able to see more patients," he said. "We were able to get more people into the walk-in clinic, and overall, things were better."

New Times' anonymous source was hired in 2020, the same year Thomas retired. She

still works there today.

She said that conditions have since worsened. Medical staff numbers are back to where they were before the health fee increase, she said, and while the clinic has made some hires in recent years, others have left in frustration over understaffing.

Despite the providers' complaints, she said the administration has continued to boast the success of the implemented fees.

According to a February 2025 report by Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs Health and Wellbeing Tina Hadaway-Mellis, the fees—which total up to more than $12 million per academic year since 2021—have brought provider numbers up to 21 and decreased the average wait time to 29 minutes, among other facility improvements.

Hadaway-Mellis told New Times these statistics are still true.

"We currently have 18 full-time medical providers as part of our Health Services staff, as well as two per diem medical providers, for a total of 20. We also had three recent medical provider vacancies that we expect to fill in the coming weeks, at which point we'll have 23 total medical providers on staff," she said via email.

The purpose of the fees wasn't just to increase staff, Hadaway-Mellis said.

"We've worked to improve access in various ways, such as developing a self-order testing program for sexually transmitted infections," she said. "The health fee has also been used to expand access to mental health services through our Counseling and Psychological Services team, which now has 25 mental health counselors."

While wait times were down, the anonymous medical provider told New Times, it wasn't because there were actually that many medical providers at the clinic.

"We kind of got to a breaking point about a year ago and said this isn't right. They're posting that, 'Oh, there's shorter wait times. There's this, there's that.' We're all working through our lunch times. We're all working after hours," she said. "There's no counterbalance. And they count on us doing our jobs as professionals. And that's why some people are leaving because they're not seeing it get better. [Administration is] keeping their promise on our backs." Δ

Reach Staff Writer Libbey Hanson at lhanson@newtimesslo.com.