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California Community Colleges are required to maintain health services for students and are allowed by law to charge a health fee for these services at the time of registration. The fee can be no more than $17 per semester and $14 for summer session. This fee is charged even if students have their own health insurance. more info

Health Services General Information
By Becky Perelli

Hi, I am Becky Perelli, the Director of Health Services here at West Valley College. A lot of people don't even know that there are health services here at WVC, but we have very accessible and high quality programs available to all students enrolled. Every student is charged a health fee when they enroll at WVC; most people want to know "What does my 17 dollars pay for?" We provide services in 4 major areas

One area is clinical service, which is much like an outpatient clinical care service, where we see people for acute healthcare concerns. This is available on a drop in basis and by appointment. We see people Mon - Thurs 8:30a - 5p. We offer clinical services relative to nutrition, anxiety, domestic violence, and hypertension, injuries, illness. We routinely do Tuberculin Skin Testing for anyone who is planning to do federal work study, tutoring, or needs this for a vocational program. We also do physicals for specific things like child care study students and those in the healthcare technologies program. We provide immunizations for those who are planning to transfer to 4 year universities or colleges - some of these are required for transferring. We can help you with those requirements as well as documenting them for your application for transfer.

We want you to know that we are here to support you as well as to share community health resources relevant to your unique needs.

Another very valuable and growing service that we have offered over the last 2 years is Personal Counseling. We know that 30% of WVC students report that stress impacts their academic performance. What this means is that they missed an important project or had to drop a class. So we have risen to the need and desire of students to have personal counseling available to help them deal with things that are impacting their academic performance.

If there are certain specialty needs that you have such as chronic illness, diabetes, chronic seizure disorders, or ADHD we would like to know about it so that we can form support groups for these specific things. You are not alone; we want to encourage you to support yourself, and we can give you some tools to do self-care to help keep you in school.

A third area of health services that we provide is Health Education and Prevention. We do quite a bit of work with other departments and programs on campus to help you access information to care for yourself. Many of these prevention activities are presented throughout the year and highlight general health and wellness, sexual health information, important screenings, addiction issues, domestic violence prevention, and a critical one is stress management. We also contribute to things like Transfer Day, Student Services Day, which means that we are integrally involved in student support services.

The fourth area of health services is Consultation for faculty and staff regarding student issues. We want to maintain communication with faculty and staff because we know that we do not see or have contact with every student. Keeping connected with staff helps us to provide access to students in an indirect way so that we can meet as many needs as possible. This also includes website access; Health Services does have an active webpage with many links to community and campus services for students.

We are very excited to let you know that we have a consulting psychiatrist, physician, and nutritionist so that when we have certain questions that we cannot answer or need some expertise on that we don't have here in health services, we have resources that are directly available to us.

Please feel free to come by health services, check out the website, or give us a call. We really want you to know that there are many services available to you. This is your health services program.

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Health Services General Information ^

© WVC Student Health Services 2002

  last updated: August 27, 2010

  If you think you may have a medical emergency call 911 immediately. The content herein is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you have read on the site.

  WVC Health Services does not recommend or endorse any specific physicians, products, procedures, tests, opinions or other information that may be mentioned on the site. Reliance on any information provided by WVC SHS is solely at your own risk.