Education by design:

Las Vegas needs nurses. The state of Nevada even said so in a mandate two years ago. To lend a hand, Community College of Southern Nevada plans to produce many more of them, and has the blueprints to prove it.

The college plans to erect a four-story Health Science Nursing building in time for fall semester 2004. The 92,000-square-foot facility, designed by JMA Architecture Studios, will accommodate twice as many registered nursing students as before on the college's Charleston campus.

With 14 lab-type classrooms and 12 general classrooms within its confines, the building will house everything from simulated operating rooms to intravenous equipment to rows of beds for mannequins posing as hospital patients.

Construction, tentatively set to start in October, comes on the heels of the college's science building, which opened its doors last week. The forthcoming facility, budgeted at $17 million, will be built next door to the current one on the south side of campus, closer to Oakey Boulevard facing College Avenue.

Tom Schoeman, JMA president, said the Health Science Nursing building, architecturally, will employ a combination of sandstone, stucco and glass in its construction, while it becomes the campus' signature building as well.

"What it's supposed to do is set the design standard for future campus development," he said.

"It does complement the existing campus but there is a color palette change, as the existing campus uses saturated colors like purples and blues. We're going to be using a `desert' color palette which will complement the campus, but it is a departure."

Inside the building, areas of study will include registered nursing, practical nursing, nursing assistant, sonography, surgical technology, medical office assisting, and pharmacy technician.

Schoeman said each lab is unique in its design and will be specifically tailored to suit the area of health it covers.

"The labs and the classrooms needed to be designed with the idea that health programs are applied academics," said Fran Brown, community college dean of the division of health sciences. "The students do need the space to see the instructors demonstrating, but I wouldn't say that the goal is to make it look like a hospital simulation."

Bob Gilbert, planning director for the college, said the current nursing program is "spread out over three buildings," so the new building will help centralize the program. Further, the building helps reaffirm Charleston's identity as a "health-oriented" campus, since it already contains programs for dentistry, anatomy and physiology.

By design, the new nursing building and just-opened science building will blend evenly with the other areas of campus, since both structures will help complete the campus' science plaza.

"The Charleston campus is organized around a series of plazas," Schoeman said. "For example, today, there's one primary plaza, closest to Charleston Boulevard. Then the current construction of the science building has established a second plaza. Then, building the Health Science Nursing building will help establish a third student plaza, where (that) building is the anchor for that plaza.

"There's a proposed future classroom building in the life transition center and library, so there will be a total of four buildings surrounding that plaza."

The nursing building will also house a lounge, reception area and patio.

In the future, it may also house the programs of emergency medical services, radiation therapy and respiratory therapy, which currently reside in other buildings on campus, Brown said.

"We're also hoping to start a new program in radiation therapy. Right now, there's no degree program in Nevada for radiation therapy," she said, noting that the program has yet to be approved.

For the time being the building, when complete, will address a more immediate need. The nursing program is admitting 64 students per semester. It will be able to admit 128 when the structure is complete, according to Brown.

"It's one of the best things that's happened in terms of my 15-year career at CCSN," she said.

"It will help the Community College of Southern Nevada to move forward in meeting the need for health care workers in the Las Vegas Valley and for Southern Nevada."

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