After several years of construction and approximately $13,000,000 in construction costs, the new floor atop Prior Hall created to house an expansion of the existing Clinical Skills Education and Assessment Center is preparing to open its doors. An open house celebration is planned for March 1 when faculty, staff and students will have an opportunity to tour the new space.
The sixth floor addition increases the on-site space designated for training medical students, as well as other health sciences students, residents and faculty, by an expansive 18,000 square feet from the original 8,100 square foot center located in the basement of Prior Hall.
The new floor includes space specifically designed to simulate actual hospital and clinical settings. An outstanding feature is the creation of flexible spaces that support greater interdisciplinary interaction. The Center’s four virtual critical care bays, for example, allow trainees from various disciplines (e.g., medicine, pharmacy, allied medicine, nursing, etc) to work together on patient simulation scenarios in rooms set up to emulate actual hospital settings, including a surgery operating room, an emergency room, a trauma bay and an intensive care suite.
The Center’s expansion allows Ohio State to bolster existing programs, launch new instructional techniques and employ new outcomes assessments to insure trainee competencies. Housing the most advanced equipment and simulators in a state-of-the-art facility, the new Center puts Ohio State at the forefront of medical education in both procedural and patient simulation nationwide and supports the three mission areas of the academic medical center — teaching, patient care and research.
