Many of us have tried to access UHS services in the past couple of months, and have been confronted with Anima. This is the UHS’s new booking system, but why is it problematic?

Firstly, the introduction of Anima to student health services is just one example in an enduring trend of the University outsourcing its services to third-party providers. As politics students, we may understand the drawbacks of privatisation such as this, namely the cost, and how this may be funded. Our tuition fees are there to pay the staff and medical professionals who look after us, but instead this money is being used to pay for Blackboard, Google, and more recently, Anima.

What is the immediate impact of the introduction of Anima? The University has been using Anima since April of this year, and it is already complicating our access to efficient and inclusive healthcare. One first-year student described the whole system as, “inaccessible and confusing”.

So, you have spent all afternoon setting up your Anima account… What now? If you want to book an appointment, first you have to get up early enough to find a free appointment, and that is provided that the system is still accepting new requests for appointments by the time you have opened Anima. Then you have to work out what the University Health Service is called on Anima’s system, which is not readily-available information.

Now the timer has started, and you have half an hour to complete all of the written forms necessary to be considered for an appointment. If this takes too long, the whole process will have to be started again!

This appointment-booking system also appears to lack provision for those students attempting to see a medical professional regarding chronic conditions. When selecting their symptoms of a long-term health condition on the booking form, one student was instructed by Anima to ‘call an ambulance’. 

However, this is not the extent of the issues students have faced. One first-year student reported her NHS profile being “wiped” after signing up to Anima. She is now left waiting on customer support before she can access essential healthcare again.

With just these examples of students struggling to access healthcare through Anima, we must question whether it is something the University can justify investing in. Is it time to question our University’s dependence upon third-party service providers? Whatever the outcome, it is our needs that must be centred in decisions about student services!

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