Conventional wisdom on campus dismisses University Health Services (UHS) as a last resort for helping an inebriated friend and not much else. Yet at least on paper, UHS is near the top; the service recently received a nearly perfect score from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). How can these be reconciled?

Are our negative perceptions of UHS based on apocryphal anecdotes dispensed to successive classes of first-years by upperclass students? Or, instead, is its reputation based on the poor care that a number of students claim to have experienced when they went to UHS?

The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. Certainly, not all of the horror stories we hear about grievous errors supposedly inflicted on friends of acquaintances of roommates could possibly be true, lest most of the people on campus suddenly find themselves pregnant quadriplegics carrying a bottle of aspirin as they wander to class. Yet the picture is not as rosy as JCAHO portrays it to be.

JCAHO’s evaluation process, in which UHS earned 99 points out of a possible 100, is described as extensive, rigorous and objective. But in a rating system that gave 78 percent of hospitals above a 90 and 99 percent of hospitals above an 80 (on the 100-point scale), a score of 99 is not nearly as impressive as it seems.

For most of the items considered, the vast majority of hospitals are placed into the best or second best group. Moreover, several areas evaluated concern documentation standards—essentially, how efficiently an organization generates voluminous documents explaining what its procedures, groups them into pretty binders and distributes them at the beginning of every year to be promptly filed and forgotten.

These observations are not intended to dismiss the accreditation process as flawed, and indeed, it clearly fills a need for oversight of our healthcare providers. But aside from the conclusions that may be drawn from these data, the fact remains that a substantial proportion of students do not trust UHS. Even the most capable medical facility in the world is useless if nobody dares to get treatment from it.

UHS needs to restore confidence among students that its patients will receive quality care. Only an atmosphere of trust will allow UHS to treat students’ problems before they become emergencies.