Earlier this week, members of TRU’s board of governors and executive team, along with Dean of Nursing Dr. Donna Murnaghan and nursing student Mackenzie Byers toured the Nursing and Population Health (NPH) building currently under construction. The excitement of being the first group to tour the NPH building provided a rich experience for those present to learn how the building will benefit students, faculty and the community once construction is complete in 2020.
Flexible teaching spaces mimic the diversity of health care in our communities including hospital wards and home and community care environments. The new building will allow learning to be adapted using new technologies, and create learning that supports excellence in meeting standards of care. These real practice-like spaces including debriefing and seminar rooms, plus much-needed student collaboration and independent study areas, will further enhance learning, with spaces being optimized to incorporate technology.
The building will also house patient simulation labs, with low-, medium- and high-fidelity labs featuring computer-driven mannequins, and up-to-date equipment and resources to reflect real situations for students to engage. As well, the new space expands learning capacity by increasing high fidelity beds from two to eight, while the overall number of lab beds will quadruple.
Not only will the new building enhance collaboration among students and faculty in the health sciences, there will also be increased opportunities for inter-professional training and collaborative partnerships with industry and across departments at TRU, including science, social work and law. There will also be more community engagement, more teamwork and more knowledge sharing in NPH’s unified environment.
This new space will enable TRU to be innovative in identifying and developing other programming that is important to our health care community across populations such as seniors, rural and home care nursing, chronic disease and mental health.
The NPH building, with its state-of-the-art facilities and technology, will be a catalyst to help TRU researchers investigate new solutions for complex health problems and create international platforms to test best practice.
The building will be open for classes in the fall of 2020.
