NEWS
FEBRUARY 26, 2019 | ARBITERONLINE.COM
AN UPDATE ON THE HEALTH PRODUCT VENDING MACHINE
ASBSU has provided funding and campus partners are expected to supply products, but Plan B likely won’t be available Jack Briggs | News Reporter | news@stumedia.boisestate.edu
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he purchase of a health and wellness vending machine, an initiative started by senior economics major Haydn Bryan nearly two years ago, was authorized on Jan. 23 by the Associated Students of Boise State University (ASBSU). The ASBSU Student Assembly and Executive council passed a bill allocating $4,500 from the student-fee funded sponsored projects account to the purchase of the vending machine. “It’s been a little slower going than I would have hoped but getting funding is a big step in the right direction,” Bryan said. “It gives a sense of concreteness and authenticity for the project. It is not just an idea anymore; it is going to happen.” The majority of the funds, $4,200, will go towards the purchase of the vending machine itself and $300 will go towards branding the machine using vinyl. Bryan also worked with Brent Delong, director of the Student Union Building, to secure a discrete and accessible location on the second floor of the SUB for the machine. However, the bill does not allocate any funds for stocking the products which will go into the machine. “The hope is to have that money be all that is needed because these are already products offered on Boise State’s campus,” Bryan said. These products include acetaminophen, Ibuprofen, Tums, allergy medicine, contraceptives, lubricant, pads, tampons, pregnancy tests, sore throat drops, first aid supplies, lotion, water bottles, nasal decongestant, artificial tears, hand sanitizer, lip balm, Vaseline, wet wipes, tissues, deodorant and nasal spray, which can currently be purchased from University Health Services, the Provisions on Demand (POD)
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Senior economics major Haydn Bryan stores and the bookstore. While the availability of these products on campus would make it easy to transfer them into a vending machine, some of the products currently carried may not be designed for vending machine distribution. “The difference is that you have to get different packaging options of the same items. So if we have Ibuprofen on campus we can’t just sell it, it has to be in a dispensable format that can be used in a vending machine. If I were to get that secondary funding it would go towards covering that transition, restocking fees and maintenance fees that are not covered by the product from the machine,” Bryan said. To get this secondary funding, Bryan is considering launching a PonyUp campaign. And to increase the machine’s
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profitability he is getting data for the Bronco Shop from the health and wellness machines at UC Davis. Bryan has been in contact with UC Davis students who advocated for a machine since Bryan started the project at Boise State. While the machines at UC Davis offer emergency contraceptives, there are no such plans to do the same at Boise State due to red flags raised by campus partners. “Not the campus partners raising red flags, but raising red flags on other people’s behalf saying ‘this is something we would need to look into more,’” Bryan said. Director of Campus Services Nicole Nimmons oversees the administration of the Bronco Shop and the Student Union and directed Bryan to take up the Plan B issue with Student Affairs. Nimmons said while she didn’t have an issue with Plan B,
it may have been a president or vice president within Student Affairs who raised concerns. While Bryan wants to see Plan B in the machines, he would rather have a machine without Plan B than no machine at all. In addition to this he would like the university to take some ownership in the project to ensure it can be sustained well into the future. At the moment, however, there are no plans in place for this. “I know the Bronco Shop is willing to order products in but I haven’t heard from Haydn on who is going to manage it, who is going to stock it, who is going to do inventory, remove expired products, and keep it all working,” Nimmons said. These discussions are still ongoing between Bryan, Nimmons and Bronco Shop Director Steve Barclay. “We had a number of questions for him and he is going to do some more fact finding. At this point, we are not committed to anything with the proposed health and wellness machine,” Barclay wrote in an email to The Arbiter. For Bryan, buy-in from the university is necessary to get the project going and would exemplify Boise State’s claim to having a culture of innovation. “This is a really good opportunity to cheaply and efficiently expand coverage of health services on Boise State’s campus in a way that is reactive to student needs and student voices,” Bryan said. “Boise State prides itself on being an innovation-focused university but this is something that is happening around the country and we are still on the bleeding edge of this wave of access to health services. If we wait five, 10, 15, or 20 years we won’t be innovators anymore, we will be followers. I don’t think that’s what Boise State wants to be.”