UCI Student Health Center — Local services in Irvine

This is genuinely the worse health service I’ve ever had the PLEASURE to experience. I’ve had about 9 bad experiences here and it took months for me to get the treatment i needed.

There were three occasions where the doctors themselves no showed on me, forcing me to reschedule the day of. The center had not notified me of their cancellation, nor were they aware of it themselves, so I had the pleasure of wasting my time by showing up to three separate appointments to be told to reschedule.

Their referral system is horrible, their insurance reception via phonecall has been consistently rude, and their website is horribly designed as well.

On another occasion, I wanted to cancel and the cancellation fee was 50$! On that same occasion the doctor was 40 minutes late because her previous appointment ran late.

UPDATE: I needed some bloodwork done that was ordered by another doctor at UCI. I called the receptionist to be told I could walk in and no more information. After walking in, the lab denied me due to lack of paper orders, which the receptionist told me nothing about. I printed the order, came back, only to be told I was missing the DX number and to come back another day. Now here’s the crazy thing, Ive had bloodwork done here before with no complications, but they didn’t have any records of that....

The doctors are fine but the system is extremely terrible. The insurance department clearly doesn't know what they are doing but they think they do. My claims were processed incorrectly multiple times and since it took them forever to correct it, my information was sent to a debt collector agency. Don't even think about submitting a formal complaint to the management. I turned one in and it took them TWO MONTHS to respond and even though I received a formal apology with a promise that I will never deal with whoever was handling my inquiries, that same person still worked on my stuff for several months and messed up everything. That person already has a reputation among the grad student community, so it's not surprising at all. Basically, they will do everything by the book (which is already predatory) and ignore all of their ethical commitment. They know students don't have any choices besides going here so they are going to exploit that as long as they can. This review is utterly bitter but imagine spending over five years teaching at UCI and being treated like this, then maybe this place actually deserves zero but...

Written from a grad student's perspective.

The good: •Easy to get to from campus.

•The price is unbeatable with GSHIP insurance.

•Several of the doctors are knowledgable and pay close attention to you and why you are there.

•The lab is the easiest lab to get work done at, period. Have you ever tried to get tests done at other, larger labs? It's awful, and usually a long wait time. Not here. Can usually be seen same day as the test is ordered from a UCI SHC physician.

•Getting an appointment outside of the academic year is easy.

•Free parking that usually isn't full.

The bad: •Some of the physicians have a bad attitude, being either condescending or aloof.

•Trying to get a referral to see a specialist, even within the UC family (even Gottschalk!) is as hard as it can be. Trust nobody along the referral process. Check and double check that your referral has been faxed to the right phone number.

For the price, it's a great facility. But know its...