Marquette University President Michael Lovell unveiled the facility’s preliminary designs to several hundred members of the Marquette community earlier this month. The design includes space for flexible laboratories, open workstations and staff offices, as well as those geared toward research, collaboration and conferencing. The 8,000-square foot space will occupy the sixth floor of the approximately 105-year-old building.

The Global Water Center is housed in a converted warehouse that offers approximately 98,000 square feet and is certified LEED Silver. Aside from tenant offices, exhibition spaces and a 44-seat lecture hall, it also includes a public café and shared core facilities such as a water flow lab. The university will also be able to take advantage of these common spaces.

The center’s overall goal is to bring university researchers together with industry experts to create synergies and connections, resulting in new business and jobs in the water technology sector, according to Kahler Slater of Milwaukee, the building’s redevelopment architect.

When construction wraps up on the space in late 2015, Marquette University will become one of several higher education tenants, including the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater’s Institute for Water Business and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences. Other founding tenants include the Fund for Lake Michigan, Noah Technologies, Sloan Valve and Veolia Water North America.

The post Marquette University Expands to Milwaukee’s Global Water Center appeared first on School Construction News.

The building includes a simulated hospital environment, featuring six beds spread throughout two intensive care rooms, two medical surgery rooms, a pediatric/neonatal intensive care unit, and a labor and delivery suite. The center also includes an apartment to simulate home health services and long-term care, two provider offices, three skill labs with various capabilities, and four debrief rooms, where instructors can walk students through video recordings of exercises they participated in or study the work of others.

“We believe we have created a national standard that can be replicated in communities across the nation to address critical health care issues of nursing shortages and patient safety, both from an educational and practical perspective,” said Dr. Margaret Faut Callahan, dean of Marquette’s College of Nursing.

The new facility was designed by Milwaukee-based firm Kahler Slater with CG Schmidt, also out of Milwaukee, serving as the general contractor.

Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare, one of the largest health care systems in Southeastern Wisconsin, contributed $1 million to the project as part of an agreement that will allow its staff to conduct 200 hours of clinical training at the new facility each year, with some assistance from the College of Nursing faculty.

Many of the rooms were designed around the use of high-tech computerized patient mannequins, which can be programmed to display a vast variety of symptoms, altering the readouts for medical monitoring equipment to demonstrate trends students can pick up on. Along with students or faculty members speaking through microphones to represent the patient’s voice, mannequins can simulate a relatively realistic, if slightly surreal, clinical experience.

“We made it as lifelike as possible,” said Mary LaFrombois, associate and senior interior designer at Kahler Slater. “We drew on our national experience in designing health care facilities to ensure it reflects how rooms are being outfitted in the field. Today’s health care facilities are trying to create healing spaces with a more home-like or hospitality-type environment.”

The university included a relatively large amount of debrief rooms — four, compared to six simulation rooms, because the debriefing process often takes significantly longer than the actual procedures. Having adequate space for students to meet with faculty members allows students to get in and out of the simulation areas quickly, increasing the number of students who can participate in simulations each day.

The design team selected tile flooring for the hospital areas and carpeting in the simulated apartment, to emphasize the difference in the two work environments. The project also features some of the hallmarks of modern medical design, like gender-neutral designs and color schemes, recognizing the changing demographics in nursing. Another medical facility trend the university employed was the use of paints with very low amounts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). VOCs are unstable chemicals that have low boiling points, meaning they are often released into the air when temperatures change. VOCs are the cause of warnings about microwaving plastic water bottles, as the heat change causes the bottles to leach chemicals into the water contained in them. Recycled content was also included in the ceiling tiles, carpeting, floor tiles, and vinyl flooring.

The post Marquette University Opens High-Tech Nursing Simulation Center appeared first on School Construction News.