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Concordia University is ramping up to become a bigger player in the ultra-competitive health care education field. A renovation of an existing building, at the university’s Columbia River campus in Northeast Portland, is under way in order to add space and technology for the nursing program.

The 41,000-square-foot structure, at first a Best Buy store and later an office building, is being converted into a new Nursing Innovation Center. Mackenzie is designing the project, which is being built by general contractor Union Corner Construction of Vancouver, Washington. Interface Engineering is taking care of mechanical and electrical needs.

Work began recently, and completion is scheduled for January 2020. The project’s design has already made an impact.

鈥淚’m really impressed,鈥� said Shawn Daley, Concordia’s chief business development officer. 鈥淭hey’re putting into place things that will help educators do research.鈥�

The center represents a renewed push into nursing for Concordia, which has the largest enrollment of a private nonprofit university in Oregon. The school in 2017 opened the 12,000-square-foot Nursing Skills Center, and is planning to soon expand its offering of nursing degrees.

To accommodate new programs and students, the building is gaining a variety of technological and educational improvements, including six simulation rooms that will replicate surgery, OB-GYN and other medical scenarios. There will also be community health rooms that look like apartments, to simulate in-home visits.

鈥淲e kind of have to set this up like a mini-hospital,鈥� Mackenzie design director Monty Hill said. 鈥淲hen the nursing students come in, they feel like they’re really in that situation.鈥�

Walls will be built to separate the rooms, and they will be topped off with ceilings as well. Daley said the original plan was to leave them open up top for observation, but the simulations create so much noise that each room needs to be somewhat isolated.

Simulations will involve professional actors performing various scenarios a nurse might encounter in a workplace, and so a studio will be built in which actors will be able to rehearse. The desire to make simulations as realistic as possible inspired the design team to incorporate working toilets in each room, and Daley said the plumbing for that might present a challenge.

Taking realism even further, a separate corridor will be built for the actors to enter simulation and changing rooms, so they don’t interact with students outside of their characters. Hill said he’s toured every nursing school in Oregon and has never seen such a corridor.

Concordia started its nursing program 10 years ago, and has since received both state and national accreditation. Daley said the school early on was graduating about 40 nursing students each year. That number has since increased to around 200 per year, but Daley said more are needed.

鈥淎dding just another 10 students is not going to make much of a dent,鈥� he said.

Supplying the world with more nurses naturally requires more education, and Daley said the Columbia River campus, located slightly east of Interstate 205, was the best choice 鈥� primarily because of the availability of space.

Though completion of the Nursing Innovation Center is still several months away, Daley said even before then classes will take place inside the building in some capacity.

While Hill has worked on many health care facilities in his career, he said he only recently joined Mackenzie, and Concordia is one of the firm’s first clients with such a project.

鈥淚 think they’re going to be one of the most advanced nursing schools in the state,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e’re excited to be a part of it.鈥�