by April Sauer, IUSON BL Director of Operations

IUSON BL’s journey to help design, build, and occupy IU’s new Health Sciences Building (located on the Regional Academic Health Campus at 10th and the 45/46 Bypass) began in April 2015. The School of Nursing has been housed in our beloved Sycamore Hall - which has served us well - since 2000, but it is now time to move on…and move up!

We first told you about the new complex a year ago in the Winter 2019 edition of The Nursing News. There has been amazing progress since then. Here are some facts and figures that will tell you more about the new Health Sciences Building and what it means for our school: 

• The Health Sciences Building is 115,000 square feet and will consolidate the IU Schools of Nursing, Medicine, Social Work, and Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences all under one roof.

• Our new Nursing Learning Resource Center (NLRC), also known as the skills lab, will be more than 8 times larger than the current NLRC in Sycamore Hall. 

• Each of the beds in the new NLRC will have its own headwall with a setup identical to those found in the new IU Health Bloomington Hospital (which is being built adjacent to the Health Sciences Building) – making the transition from the NLRC to the hospital’s clinical rotations seamless for our students.

• Classroom spaces in the Health Sciences Building are all fully equipped with the latest A/V technologies. 

• The classrooms are fully flexible, with the capacity to hold up to 240 students/participants for Interprofessional Practice and Education (IPE). The largest room is over 4,700 square feet and can be divided into four (4) smaller rooms that can each hold around 70 people.

• To complement this large meeting space, there are ten (10) IPE Team Rooms.  With Nursing, Medicine, Social Work, and Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences all housed in the same building, the opportunities for increased collaboration across academic units are endless, making our IPE events more effective and efficient.

This project has led to new levels of collaboration, planning, and preparation between the four academic units occupying the Health Sciences Building. Associate Deans and Department Chairs have been meeting monthly since 2018 to make the broad overarching decisions that guide our everyday planning and decision-making. Our partnership with IU Health Bloomington has also flourished during the planning process.