If you have $8 million to spare, you might consider using it to have Duke’s new nursing building named after you.
You only have until August 2006, however, and the clock started ticking Tuesday afternoon, when administrators and faculty of the School of Nursing, along with President Richard Brodhead, participated in a ground-breaking ceremony for the new 56,000-square-foot facility.
The new building will bring all nursing students together under one roof, a change from the current dispersion of students amongst the school’s five locations—a building on Ninth Street that houses the Accelerate Bachelor of Science in Nursing Program, the basement of Duke South that serves several nursing master’s programs, the Bell Building, which is primarily used for its labs, and the offices and classrooms in both the Hanes House and the School of Nursing building on Trent Drive.
The new facility will also allow for the expansion of more programs such as the creation of a new doctorate program called “Trajectories of Care” that will prepare nurse scientists to answering questions about the outcomes of health and illness over time.
Dr. Catherine Gilliss, dean of the School of Nursing, hopes that a large cafe and a central courtyard with wireless Internet access will bring together not only nursing students, but undergraduate students as well, creating a better educational environment that will “lead to intellectual synergies that just aren’t happening right now.”
“Duke undergraduates don’t understand what a nurse does today,” she said. “Everyone has seen ER, but there’s no clear concept that they could do that as a career.”
Costing $17.8 million, the facility will bring state-of-the-art computer and website technologies to the school, supplementing technology the school already relies on, like video-conferencing and the Internet.
In addition to wireless access inside and outside of the facility, the new building will have a distance-based learning room where teleconferences will let students listen to faculty lecture from different universities across the country.
The new building will also have several innovative labs using simulation technology to recreate actual health care events by having mannequins wired to computer programs. A large suite will function as a control room where different programs can be conducted, said David Bowersox, business manager for the School of Nursing.
Administrators hope that the construction of the new building and the addition of the Ph.D. program will increase student enrollment, up from the current 433 students in the 2004-2005 school year. In addition to the current construction, they also hope to complete a second phase that would increase the square footage to 71,500 and would cost an additional $5 million.
The groundbreaking ceremony went smoothly, but Gilliss said she was faced with some humorous problems when Mitchell Vann, building manager for the School of Nursing, confronted her about the building’s design.
“He inquired about the specifications for parts of the building and he said to me, ‘Are the urinals in the men’s room automatic flush or not?’ and I looked at the Associate Dean for Business and Finance, and he looked at me, and I haven’t got a clue,” Gilliss recalled. “But Mitchell said it’s important because apparently the structure of the plumbing system varies if you have an automatic flush or a manual flush.”
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