This fall, University of Wisconsin nursing students will come back on campus to a new space they can call their own.
Cooper Hall, named after legendary UW alumna Signe Skott Cooper, was constructed largely because the school was previously located within the UW Hospital building, Mary Anderson, a nursing school spokesperson, said.
In that environment, people are often more spread out, which does not lend itself well to a team atmosphere, she said. The new building allows nursing students and faculty to do much more, and even the technology is a “huge step up” from what they had before, she said.
George Jura, the director of academic technology at the School of Nursing, said the technological advances at the school can be separated into two categories: active and clinical learning. Learning at the School of Nursing occurs in three settings: the classroom, the lab and the hospital floor, he said.
Under “active learning,” which happens in a classroom setting, the focus of Cooper Hall is teamwork, Jura said. Traditional lecture halls do not exist there. Instead, the active learning spaces are designed to make it easy for students to collaborate, he said.
The hope is that eventually this setting will foster interprofessional education, bringing together students from nursing, pharmacy and medical school to create more realistic situations. Both active learning labs can hold an entire class of 153 nursing students and a combined total of 306 students if necessary, he said.
“Clinical learning” happens in a lab setting, and this is where technology really takes off, Jura said, citing simulations in multiple levels of health care, creating mock-ups of clinical settings, hospital suites and even a home health apartment.
The hospital suite is home to “high fidelity mannequins,” which are programmed to show symptoms of various illnesses, Anderson said.
“The birthing mother can give birth every minute-and-a-half,” she said. “After just having a young one of my own, that is astonishing to me.”
The nursing school went from having one mannequin at its previous location to having five at Cooper Hall, Jura said.
Cooper Hall’s construction also comes in light of a predicted nursing shortage in the state.
In Gov. Scott Walker’s address at the ribbon cutting ceremony, he said, “On top of that, it’s not just a nursing shortage — which has been identified for quite some time — but a change in health care that’s on the horizon.”
Walker said about a third of nurses in the state are soon going to be at retirement age. Walker said a “next wave” of nurses will need to come in and provide care, especially in rural parts of the state and urban areas with high levels of poverty.
“More importantly than the walls themselves … the work and the research done here will help us lead the way when it comes to not just health care, but health,” Walker said at the ceremony. “And the nurses that will be trained here will be an excellent part of that.”
