Jennifer R. Smith '96 says a UHS nurse called her after a routine blood test to tell her one of the tests was abnormal.

"I asked her which one was abnormal, but [the nurse] said, "I don't want to get into that right now," Smith says.

Smith went in for a retest on a Thursday: and the nurse told her to call her on Monday: Smith left a message, but the nurse did not return her call. Two days later, Smith called again.

"Over the telephone she told me. It looks like you have a tumor in your pituitary gland, but it's really no big deal," Smith says. "It's hard for someone who has just been told she has a brain tumor to comprehend the words, 'no big deal.' I was very upset with the way the information was presented to me."

To mention Dr. Dana Farnsworth around the University Health Services (UHS) is to invoke the name John Harvard outside University Hall. Both names will be recognized, even by those who never knew them personally.

It was Farnsworth, as UHS director 30 years ago, who built up UHS into a facility that may be the best of its kind in the country. And it is Farnsworth vision that today serves as the governing principle for UHS easy access to health care for all members of the Harvard community.

But while UHS's numerous resources and specialists now attract tens of thousands of student visit a year. Farnsworth's vision of easy access has yet to come to function.

Many students say they often have great difficulty obtaining care. According to a Crimson poll of 317 undergraduates last week, only 46 percent said care is "somewhat easy" or "very easy" to access at UHS.

Doctors and administrators say having a primary care doctor is the best way for a student to access the care UHS provides But the majority of students in the survey 63 percent have not enlisted a UHS primary care physician. There was a five percent margin of error in the poll.

An overwhelming majority of more than 80 students interviewed in the past month expressed strong dissatisfaction not only with the quality of care they receive at UHS, but also with their access to that care.

While UHS doctors and administrators largely discount student complaints about care, they widely agree that the health service needs to improve the availability of that care.

"The problem here is access People are real dissatisfied with access says Dr. Peter J. Zaromskis '66, director of the UHS urgent care clime. "I think that's really an important problem. It's because of the constraint of costs."

Dr. Robert Fasciano, chief of the dental health services, says it is especially hard for students to periodically obtain care when they don't fully understand how UHS works.

"Certainly, everything could use improvement," says Dr. Robert Fasciano, chief of the dental health services "I use the health facilities here, and I know how the system works. It's a lot more difficult for someone who doesn't know the system."

In the fall of 1990, UHS scrapped its first-floor walk-in clinic, which allowed any student who wanted treatment to come in and get it, in favor of a new rapid access system of appointments. The walk-in system had caused patients to wait for hours.

Under the rapid access system, sick students who call in are supposed to receive 15-minute appointments either that day or the next--often with a nurse practitioner. Many doctors have touted this as the answer to UHS access problems, but others say it is not.