What are your plans in terms of increasing students' accessibility to the student health services? In particular, how to enable more students to seek physician help when the clinic is already overflowing? -Alice Wang, Science U2

There are many things I am sure you would like to hear someone say to this question such as: I will increase the amount of staff in the health clinic, I will allow for students to book appointments on more than just the 15th of the month, even as you mentioned yourself preventative care is one particular idea that sounds nice. The reality is to do any of these incurs large costs. I would absolutely work on lobbying the McGill administration to implement changes, but they need to be feasible and I think the first steps would to be to promote change into the way students book appointments. I am under the impression that they only allow bookings once a month so that they queue for appointments does not extend to lengths that render treatment for something that has come up irrelevant. A new system would have to take this into consideration and while I don't have a solution I do think that there must be a better way than calling in early in the morning one day a month. 

I know this answer leaves stones unturned but I with the information I have and the known restrictions of resources, it is the best I have. I encourage you to keep asking this question and hopefully we can come up with more developed answers as time moves forward. Because McGill already knows that these problems exist and now going forward we will have to propose solutions to such problems. Before we suggest solutions we need to allow for student input so that we have their support. Before students gain access to a new appointment booking system it will need to be reviewed and consultations should be held with representatives from the student body as well as the administration. The foreseeable concrete action is to make the McGill administration to hold these consultations using the student feedback so we can get past the point of acknowledging the problem.