Campaign for the UW-Madison School of Nursing

Schematic designs for the new School of Nursing learning center show a five-story building with a two-story north wing at the corner of Highland Avenue and Observatory Drive.

The State Building Commission approved plans Wednesday, March 16, to construct a new $52.2 million School of Nursing building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The project, the top campus building priority, was added to the governor’s proposed capital budget for 2011-2013.

“The nursing school will help us address the state’s shortage of nurses,” Governor Scott Walker said. “It will allow Wisconsin to train the next generation of health-care professionals so we can meet the needs of our citizens.”

The proposed budget provides funding in two stages. It would authorize construction using $17.4 million in gifts and grants and $17 million in funds shifted from the UW-Madison’s 2011-2013 maintenance budget. An additional $17 million taxpayer supported bonding would be dedicated to the project in the next biennium.

The Power of Nursing Campaign has already raised $14.1 million of the private dollars needed for construction.

“We are extremely grateful for everyone’s support of this project,” Dean Kathryn May said. “Our school has a proud tradition of educating nurse leaders who make a significant impact on the health and well- being of the state’s citizens. This new building will allow that tradition to continue.”

With legislative approval and successful fundraising, the School could break down this fall on the building that will make room for a 30 percent increase in enrollment and programming. With large interactive classrooms, the project paves the way for nursing, medicine, public health and pharmacy students to collaborate on virtual cases. Student nurses will learn patient care in simulated hospital and home environments, and wired classrooms will allow the School to better provide innovative onsite and distance instruction.

The School received schematic drawings February 25 for the learning center at the corner of Highland Avenue and Observatory Drive. “This building will create incredible space for our faculty to teach, our students to learn and for them to create the future of nursing in Wisconsin,” May said, adding the project will be a signature building for West campus.

Cap Times reporter Todd Finklemeyer writes more about why the governor, who originally did not include the nursing project in his 2011-2013 capital budget, reconsidered the project at The Capital Times.

Schematic designs for the new School of Nursing learning center show a five-story building with a two-story north wing at the corner of Highland Avenue and Observatory Drive.

School of Nursing faculty and staff had their first look February 25 at schematic designs for the School’s new building, which features a two-story atrium, 300-seat auditorium; wired, interactive classrooms, and simulation labs.

“This building will create incredible space for our faculty to teach, our students to learn and for them to create the future of nursing in Wisconsin,” Dean Kathryn May said. “This is designed for the future; that’s the best part.” The new five-story learning center with a two-story north wing will be a signature building for West campus, she added.

“We are the marker at the corner of Highland and Observatory,” said Mark VanderWoude, assistant dean for facilities. “We are the building everyone will see.”

The $52.2 million public/private project is the top campus building priority for the 2011-2013 budget. The School will learn later this month if the nursing center is included in Governor Scott Walker’s capital budget. It also must be approved by the Legislature before work can begin.

The Power of Nursing campaign has raised $13.1 million of the $17.4 million in private support needed for the nursing center. With a successful campaign and state approval, the School could break ground this fall for the project that is designed to educate nurses for the next 100 years and to meet a growing need for nurses to care for an aging population.

The schematic design combines the best of what nursing faculty said they wanted and needed in the new building with what is possible with the dollars available, May said. “This is the first campus project in a decade to bring schematic designs in on budget,” she said.

The 160,000-square-foot building (99,000 assignable square feet) includes 180- and 290-seat interactive classrooms in which nursing, medical and pharmacy students will collaborate on virtual cases. Nursing students will gain valuable experience in state-of-the-art hospital and home-care simulation rooms. The new building has room for 30 percent more students and faculty, as well as additional programs and research.

The schematic design sets how big the building will be, how it will sit on the site and that the materials used will be similar to those on the neighboring Rennebohm Hall, home of the School of Pharmacy, VanderWoude said. While the overall square footage and the size of the rooms within it will not change significantly, these are not final drawings of what the new building will look like, he said.

About a third of the building is devoted to classroom space. It also includes a two-story atrium and will incorporate limestone from the former nursing dormitory at 1402 University Avenue. “The Cave” will present opportunities to develop an immersive, virtual environment to pursue advanced research to improve patient care. Faculty/research space will occupy two floors.

The nursing building will form a quadrangle with Rennebohm Hall, which will be landscaped to feel like the lakeshore path, VanderWoude said. The quad will include a patio and a council ring. “We needed to create a sense of quality,” he said. “We needed a sense of campus.”

The entry to Rennebohm Hall will be remodeled and a medicinal garden will be added as part of the project.

Former UW-Madison Chancellor Donna Shalala believes enough in the campaign to build a new home for the School of Nursing that she wrote a personal check to support it, she told WISC-TV.

 By training doctors, nurses and pharmacists together, the School will transform medicine, said Shalala, who was in Madison as keynote speaker for the 11^th annual Littlefield Leadership Lecture. Channel 3000 has posted the interview online at www.channel3000.com/localvideo/index.html?v=31470.

Reporter Ton Fanlund talks to Shalala about nursing, Madison and football: http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/madison_360/article_28501ce4-d57f-11df-a2c7-001cc4c03286.html

Donna Shalala, PhD, president of the University of Miami and former chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, presents the 11^th annual Littlefield Leadership Lecture from 8 a.m. to noon Friday, October 15, in the Wisconsin Union Theater. She chairs the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-Institute of Medicine Initiative on the Future of Nursing and will discuss the recently released findings of the initiative that was organized in response to a continuing nurse shortage, limited educational opportunities for nursing and rapidly expanding technology. The report includes new ways to recruit, educate and retain nurses; to deliver nursing in a variety of settings, and to address nurses’ role in the health-care workforce.

A panel of health care leaders, Dean Katharyn May, Wisconsin Nurses Association President Carolyn Krause and health care consultant Richard Sinaiko, will respond the Shalala’s talk and the nursing report.

Tickets are sold out.

Shalala has more than 25 years of experience as an accomplished scholar, teacher and administrator. In 1992, Business Week named her one of the top five managers in higher education. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed her U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). Her eight-year tenure made her the longest serving HHS Secretary in U.S. history. She managed a nearly $600 billion budget, which included programs from Social Security to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Shalala has more than three dozen honorary degrees and a host of other honors, including the Medal of Freedom presented by President George W. Bush in 2008.

A $500,000 gift from Barbara D. and M. Keith Weikel (’62 MS PHM, ’66 PhD BUS) has provided further momentum to the campaign for a new University of Wisconsin-Madison Nursing Science Center.

The Weikels’ gift will name the Barbara D. Weikel Clinical Practice Laboratory in the Nursing Science Center, to be located in the heart of UW-Madison’s vibrant health science campus.

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Kahler Slater, a Wisconsin-based architectural-engineering firm, has been selected to conduct programming validation and provide the architectural design for the planned UW–Madison School of Nursing’s Nursing Science Center.  Construction on the $52 million, 100,000-square-foot building is slated to begin in 2011, with completion scheduled for summer 2013.

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