UNCW breaks ground for new facility

[cougarnurse]

UNCW breaks ground on new nursing facility | StarNewsOnline.com | Star-News | Wilmington, NC

University of North Carolina Wilmington officials broke ground Thursday on a $30 million nursing building.


Though it is not scheduled to open until 2010, after nursing student Sara Price has graduated, the senior was still excited about the facility as she joined school administrators and local politicians for the ceremony.

“Our space right now is so cramped,” said Price, president of the school’s Association of Nursing Students. She said she plans to work in the area after graduation. “When the building comes, it’s going to be amazing. They can take a great program and make it even better.”

During her time in the two-year program, Price and other nursing students have shuttled between different buildings on campus to get to nursing classes.

Price’s pediatrics class, for example, meets in a modular unit on one day and in a building across campus on others. Sometimes, even the professors have been confused, ending up in different classrooms than the students.
“People don’t know where our home base is,” she said.

The new 75,000-square-foot building will increase UNCW’s space for both nursing students and teachers. The school plans to outfit it with high-tech labs and equipment, in part for the School of Nursing’s clinical simulation program in which students train on computer-operated simulators before working on real patients.

In 2006, state lawmakers gave UNCW the $30 million to build the facility, which will be located at the intersection of Reynolds and Cahill drives on the school’s campus.

Work on preparing the site is scheduled to start in December, and actual construction should follow the month after.

University officials said the new building will help UNCW increase the number of students training in nursing, a field that is not expected to have enough workers in the coming years as North Carolina’s population ages.

“There’s such a shortage. The only way to create more nurses is to graduate more nurses,” UNCW Chancellor Rosemary DePaolo said. “With this, we will have the space, and we’ll be able to attract top-notch faculty. This is going to be a state-of-the art building.”