VCU breaks ground for new School of Nursing

By Malorie Burkett and Pamela DiSalvo Lepley

Officials at Virginia Commonwealth University today kicked off a $17 million construction project to build a new, state-of-the-science School of Nursing education building.

The four-story building will be constructed on the university’s MCV Campus at Leigh and 11^th streets. It will include research space, a clinical learning center with human patient simulators, a community outreach nursing center, large classrooms and faculty offices.

At groundbreaking ceremonies at the construction site today, VCU President Eugene P. Trani, Ph. D., said that the school is more than bricks and mortar.

“The goal is that increased space and modern classrooms and facilities will be part of the solution to the nursing shortage and improving healthcare -- by educating more nurses who will enter the workforce as competent healthcare professionals,” Trani said.

Bureau of Labor statistics indicate that the nation will need 1 million new nurses to meet the escalating demands of the aging population. Virginia will need 22,000 new nurses. Current projections are that without increases in enrollments in nursing education programs, one in three patients in the state will not have a nurse to care for them by the year 2020.

“The new nursing education building is the cornerstone to our ability to expand enrollment, attract faculty and educate students with the latest knowledge for a technologically intense healthcare environment,” said Sheldon M. Retchin, M.D., CEO of the VCU Health System and VCU vice president for health sciences. “The new building will allow us to sustain programs of research and service to the care of our fellow Virginians in illness and in health.”

Over the past decade, the VCU School of Nursing has experienced dramatic growth in both enrollment and research funding. Undergraduate and graduate enrollment nearly doubled from 444 to 838 students. Research funding grew from $300,000 to $2.8 million, catapulting the nursing school from a ranking of 84^th to 25^th in the United States for National Institutes of Health-funded research.

“The activities occurring in this 21^st century School of Nursing simply have significantly exceeded the capacity of the current building to expand and adapt,” said Nancy Langston, R.N., Ph.D., dean of the VCU School of Nursing. “Though members of the nursing community have achieved much under the constraints of the current building, we believe the construction of this new facility is a significant developmental milestone in support of our life’s work.”

In the new facility, students will learn on sophisticated human-patient simulators that can be programmed both to show symptoms of certain conditions and diseases and to respond to various interventions, such as medication. Students in the 150-seat auditorium will be able to watch other students working on the simulators and use hand-held devices to indicate whether they agree or disagree with a particular intervention.

Langston also said the new building will add much-needed research space to allow faculty and students to conduct research from bench science to the bedside.

The new nursing teaching and research facility will replace the current building on Broad Street that was built as a dormitory in 1928. Construction will begin in July with completion anticipated in 2007.

The state is contributing $14 million of the construction cost, with $3 million coming from private funds.