New building at PNWU in Yakima will promote collaboration between health science students

Students and staff from the Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences in Yakima soon will walk the halls of a new, state-of-the-art building designed to promote collaboration.

There is a reason the new 53,000-square-foot building is named the Student Learning Collaborative, or SLC. From its inception, PNWU instructors and administrators were involved with the design process. The result is a space large and versatile enough to encompass study and education spaces for students in different health disciplines.

“It takes lots of focus groups,” said Jameson Watkins, chief information officer at PNWU as he walked through the new building. “We of course have experts in all these fields, practicing clinicians, and educators on our campus. We go in and we have listening sessions, we then look at the curriculum and look at those needs.”

Construction started on the building in June 2022, and it will be finished by September. It will house the school’s occupational therapy program, though most programs on campus will have some presence inside, including the doctor of osteopathic medicine, physical therapy and nursing programs.

It’s part of a two-building complex. Almost immediately after the first building opens, construction will start on SLC 2 for PNWU’s new School of Dental Medicine. The 30,000-square-foot SLC 2 building is scheduled to open in 2024. The cost of the two buildings is estimated at $34 million, and so far the project is under budget and on schedule, Watkins said.

The new complex will be the largest in the university’s 18-year history. It will be larger than 60,000-square-foot Butler-Haney Hall, which is the current home of the school’s simulation lab.

Built for simulations

With help from the Yakima-based architecture firm, Digital Design and Development, Watkins said designers came up with a layout for the building that allows for multi-use spaces that can convert from classrooms to simulation rooms to individual study rooms.

Lisa Steele, executive director of the school’s simulation center, was a prominent voice in the design, given that the SLC will contain cutting-edge simulation labs.

In the SLC’s east wing, Steele showed what she called a tiered space. Though the layout is just walls, doors and windows, Steele said everything was placed purposely to serve as an area where instructors can walk students through a simulation before it happens, a spot for students to work away from instructors once a simulation starts and one room over, an area for case discussions after the simulation.

Steele said this way, students working on different aspects of a simulation at the same time can move through the process with efficiency and without having to interrupt others in a different part of the process.

“This is one place where we’ll see that difference of perspective on how we should design that space,” Steele said. “Some of our clients want one single large space to debrief everybody together, that’s the nursing concept. Others typically break groups into two separate groups because they want them to debrief on their experience, not everyone’s. Both are two different philosophies.”

Occupational therapy

Dr. Heather Fritz, director of PNWU’s school of occupational therapy, said her students and staff have spent years looking forward to the new space.

One of the features Fritz said she’s most excited about is a performance lab. The lab is essentially what an average apartment would look like. Fritz said it will be used to help occupational therapy students learn how to adjust a patient’s living area to fit their mobility and health needs.

She said the SLC’s occupational therapy space will also include a pediatric sensory gym, something that not all occupational therapy schools have.

“It’s a very high-end gym and it’s going to resemble what you would find maybe over at Children’s Village or Seattle Children’s Hospital,” she said. “We’re going to be able to train our students with pediatric clients in the same way that they’re going to be working with them in clinics.”

Fritz praised the building’s collaborative design. During her time studying and working at other schools, Fritz said she rarely saw students from different disciplines interact.

“One of the other reasons this building is so exciting for us is it was designed from the beginning with this idea of inter-professional collaboration,” Fritz said. “Lots of universities have OT and PT (physical therapy) and DO (doctor of osteopathic medicine) and all these different things but to design a building that essentially ensures that they all come together is quite rare.”

Fritz said the design of the building was more than for just the benefit of students and instructors. She said it was designed with the needs of Yakima County in mind.

Since PNWU’s mission is to educate health care providers to work in rural and medically underserved communities in the Pacific Northwest, Fritz said the school had to sit down and take a look at what the best way to do that would be with the new building.

“We don’t have enough DOs, we don’t have enough docs, we don’t have enough OTs and PTs in the area,” Fritz said. “So when you get all these highly trained people who know how to work together and they know who to call in to make sure their patients get the right care, that’s basically doing it right.”