Spring semester marks a new era for three UF colleges

As spring semester begins this week at the University of Florida, students in the colleges of Health Professions, Nursing and Pharmacy will be the first to attend classes in the colleges’ sophisticated and technologically advanced new home.

The 173,133-square-foot complex, called the Health Professions/Nursing/Pharmacy Complex, provides educational, administrative and research space for the three colleges. Each college has its own entrance and facilities, and a 500-seat auditorium is available to faculty and students from the entire UF Health Science Center for special events. Construction on the five-story, $24.7 million structure began in December 2000.

Shared classrooms, lecture halls and teaching laboratories are located on the ground and first floors. Faculty and staff offices, which will be occupied in March, are on the upper floors. A covered walkway links the complex to the Health Science Center.

A student services center for all three colleges offers admissions materials, program information, and academic and financial counseling. The merging of the three colleges’ support services space is in keeping with UF’s strategic plan, which emphasizes the sharing of resources.

Specially designed classrooms, wireless technology and videoconferencing capabilities enhance the three colleges’ nine distance learning degree programs.

The completion of the new complex signifies the end of decades of space insufficiencies for the College of Health Professions and gives the college its first permanent home. The college’s six departments have never shared a common space, having occupied locations in five separate buildings prior to moving into the new facility.

“For the first time in our history, the College of Health Professions has a unified space with the majority of our programs under one roof,” said Robert Frank, Ph.D., dean of the college. “Our students and faculty members have more opportunities to interact, and we are now able to create more interdisciplinary research and education programs.”

Unique features of the Health Professions’ area of the building include a practicum testing center with one-way observation windows and video recording capabilities for rehabilitation counseling students. Cameras and TV screens in a large physical therapy skills laboratory display live camera shots of various exercises and movements of parts of the body.

The building also includes an “activities of daily living” laboratory with a working kitchen, bathroom and living room, designed to resemble a typical home environment where occupational therapy students can practice training patients to regain skills such as bathing, dressing, grooming and meal planning.

The new facility provides the College of Nursing with approximately three times the space it previously occupied, with room for faculty offices, state-of-the-art classrooms and research facilities.

The college’s expanded and enhanced Nursing Resource Center is an educational laboratory and teaching space that allows for more computer-assisted instruction of students. The center, which accommodates approximately 160 people, comes equipped with advanced technology, including wireless Web access, projection screens for each laboratory, two human patient simulators and an intravenous simulator.

The human patient simulators guide students through difficult invasive procedures so they can practice before treating real patients.

The new building provides the College of Nursing’s burgeoning research program with increased space and resources. The facility contains four research data collection/examination rooms, including a physiology wet laboratory where researchers will be able to process, store and analyze laboratory samples.

“We are very pleased about the opportunities this state-of-the-art facility will offer nursing students and faculty members,” said Kathleen Ann Long, Ph.D., R.N., dean of the College of Nursing. “The new building complex provides visibility for all three colleges on the UF campus and facilitates our sharing of resources and ideas.”

The new building gives the College of Pharmacy a chance to expand access to its educational programs while providing opportunities for hands-on learning.

“Our building is unique from the standpoint that it probably is the first college of pharmacy in the country that is completely wireless in design,” said William Riffee, Ph.D., dean of the College of Pharmacy.

The building’s digital environment will enable the college to enhance and digitally capture lectures and educational demonstrations for its doctor of pharmacy (Pharm.D.) curriculum and transmit to students at three distance education sites in Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa/St. Petersburg. The college also offers a nationally recognized distance education working professional Pharm.D. program for students across the nation and in Germany.

A skills laboratory and a new, fully equipped practice pharmacy, donated by national pharmacy chain CVS, emulate a state-of-the-art community drugstore where students can gain real-world experience in pharmacy practice. A modern computer library with prescription software and hardware, donated by the Eckerd Corp., also sets the building apart from all other pharmacy education facilities in the country, Riffee said. Space in the new building complements the wet laboratory facilities currently under renovation in the pharmacy wing of the Medical Science Building on the UF campus.