Accessing health-care services is promising to be as easy as a walk down the hall for students in the Sooke school district.
A program bringing together the district, Island Health and Ministry of Children and Family Development has wellness centres in three secondary schools for the new school year — Belmont with about 1,200 students, Royal Bay with 900 and Edward Milne with 700.
The Belmont wellness centre will be the hub of the program, said Kathy Easton, public-health manager for Island Health.
This is the second such school-based initiative for Island Health, Easton said. The first started last year at Nanaimo’s John Barsby Secondary which Easton described as well-received and busy.
A similar model for school wellness centres is common in the United States, she added.
“Many youth do not access health care when they need it. The idea of creating wellness centres within schools is to improve access for the youth and their families to primary care and a range of wellness services.
That means it will not be manned by only doctors and nurse practitioners, but also by public-health nurses and mental-health and substance use, [provincial government] mental-health counsellors.
The program is being rolled out through September, Sooke school district superintendent Jim Cambridge said.
“I think we’re going to just try to get kids introduced to it, and then toward the end of the month . . . we’ll have all the staff in there,” he said. “If it expands, it could potentially be open evening and weekends.”
The program is for all youth in the Sooke district, whether they are in school or not, Easton said. It will start with physicians working half days at all three schools, while Belmont will also have a staff that includes two half-day nurse practitioners and two full-time public-health nurses.
A poll taken at the three district high schools points to basic health care as the main service desired, followed by sexual health and mental health.
There are many reasons a student might not be seeking out health care, Easton said.
“One of them is just simply being able to access and knowing where to go when they need something.”
The wellness centres are designed to be “non-stigmatizing” for students.
“If they did have something that they needed to talk to somebody about, they could access anyone in that centre.”
Cost of the program is minimal, Easton said.
“Really, there isn’t an investment of new dollars,” she said. “It’s really moving people who are doing work in another area and placing them right into a high school.
“What we have done is really reorganize our system to meet the needs of the students where they’re at.”
For the school district’s part, it’s main role is providing and leasing the required space, said Cambridge, who called the program “very exciting.”
Some retrofitting is being done at Royal Bay and Edward Milne, and Belmont space located in a portion of the school’s Neighbourhood Learning Centre is ready to go.
“They’ll have four examination rooms, meeting rooms, office space, clinic area,” he said.
Belmont’s clinic space, for example, can fill a large need, Cambridge said. He said he sees value in “the whole notion of having 1,200 citizens in a building all day and giving them some direct health-care service,” rather than sending them to places like emergency rooms.
