BY ROSA KIM

In print | November 15, 2007

Worth Health Center now offers a prescription delivery service in partnership with Good Neighbor Pharmacy in Media. The service, which is primarily for students unable to get their prescriptions filled due to illness or injury, delivers prescriptions from the pharmacy to Worth Monday through Thursday at 3 p.m.

Worth’s new director, Beth Kotarski, said she looked into making the service available this semester after students asked for some kind of a system in which they could get medication that is not readily available at the health center.

Kotarski researched health centers at neighboring institutions such as Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, University of Pennsylvania and Widener University to get a sense of the kinds of services they offer as a basis for comparison.

Kotarski found that most schools in the area have established relationships with their local pharmacies, which make deliveries at regular intervals. “What health center directors usually do, especially when they’re new, is look around and see what are some of the services being offered or not, that perhaps other colleges do or don’t do. So I really like to compare to other places and see, what’s the norm, what’s the standard,” Kotarski said.

Worth nurse practitioner Eileen Strasiunias said that the new system might also enable doctors to prescribe medication they may have been hesitant to prescribe previously, now that they know it will be readily available.

“It probably worked okay before, but you can hand a student a prescription and you wonder if they’re actually going to get it filled. I’d say it ensures that the kids are going to get what they need and gives us a little bit of peace of mind knowing that they’re taken care of,” Strasiunias said.

The idea of the new delivery service is welcomed by students. “That seems like it would be really useful because I know that people have a hard time getting off campus to get prescriptions filled if you don’t have a car or a friend who does,” Nora Nussbaum ’08 said.

In order to use the service, students need to pay the co-pay at pick-up as they would if they were getting their prescription filled on their own. However, they would have to pay with cash or check because Worth does not presently accept credit cards.

While the service is available for all students regardless of their physical or medical condition, at least for now, with the service still in its initial stages, Kotarski hopes that it will be used primarily by those who are unable to get to a pharmacy on their own.

“What we’re hoping is that this system will be used really for students of need because of illness or some kind of infirmity that would be a lot to ask them to go get their own medicine … We really don’t want, at least initially, to overtax the system,” Kotarski said.

Kotarski said she recognizes that there are more pressing issues for students, such as transportation to non-urgent medical appointments. “That seems to be a huge issue,” she said. She said her intent was to have this simpler service up and running while she looks into the larger issue of providing transportation, which will involve several different offices. “We have to develop a better system of transport,” Kotarski said. “We’re looking at ways of improving that. This is step one, the pharmacy piece.”

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