Interview with Jacque De Fouw 4

7. How would you compare your experiences of studying and teaching health care at different universities on a national level? Do you feel that the government needs to find a new health care system for its university students?

It is hard for me to compare because I worked at a community college campus in Michigan and we didn’t have a health care center. I have worked in hospitals in Michigan.

8. What would you say are the pros and cons to having a privately run health care system in the United States?

I think we have been having a crisis for probably the last twenty years; prior to that, there weren’t as many people, it seemed better then—we didn’t have as much litigation or fear of litigation, people were very trusting with hospitals and I’m sure that probably led to the litigations and things. But I think that HMO’s are run on the same type of thing that we do here, that you pay ahead and then you can go in and be seen for whatever you need to be seen. We have two major parts in our health center here and one is to educate, to teach people ways to stay well, which is my job, and then if they get sick or hurt, to take care of them and get them back into wellness. And of course, our big theme is “Wellness must be pre-requisite to all else. Students cannot be intellectually proficient if they’re physically and psychologically unwell.” That was written by Earnest Boyer. I know a lot of health educators use this statement, but the bottom line is if you’re sick, you can’t do well in school, and we want to keep you well—mentally, physically, socially, in all realms. So that is a big calling. To use a cliché, “you lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” And we do as much education as I can handle. Myself, I have two graduate assistants and we try to do the education. Now with an HMO, they will triage a person when they come in; they will decide if that person needs education, if they need maintenance or if it’s an acute episode and they need intensive care. So, they kind triage them into those ways and decide what they need. And a lot of the people that come in here, only need to learn how to do something or how to take care of themselves; they may be fine, but they might need to change their diet or something like that. We kind of do the same kind of thing. So, if someone has a bad illness, we send him or her off to a hospital or that type of facility. I think that we are much like the HMO’s.

I like being able to choose my own provider. I like to be able to go to the provider that I have chosen and not one that is chosen for me. I think it’s important to be able to make informed decisions.

I lived in a city right on the Canadian border and “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” And it sounds great; countries like Great Britain and Canada have the social medicine system where you are entitled to medical care. It sounds wonderful, but in actuality, our hospitals in the states are filled with Canadians. Two-thirds of the nurses in the hospital in which I worked were Canadian nurses. I taught in a nursing school, and they would hire the Canadian nurses over our students, because they maybe had more experience and they tended to work for a lower wage. These Canadian nurses would take the ferry across or come across the bridge to work in our hospitals and the patients would come to us because they couldn’t get the care they needed when the needed it. We had patients come for orthopedic surgery that had broken their leg and they needed surgery on it, but they were scheduled for six months down the road, or they had breast cancer and they couldn’t have their breasts removed right away and they had to wait for three months. Well, you don’t wait with those things. There was a terrible back log and plus they are under staffed like we are in the hospitals and the nurses tend to be coming to the states to get paid more. It was not a panacea that we see it as. When I break my leg, I want to take care if it right away; I don’t want to have to live with it for at least six months and have it re-broken and set. If I had gallbladder disease and needed to have my gallbladder removed, I need to do it now, not in two months when they have an opening. That has been a problem. It sounds great for everybody to be covered.