University of Rochester
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Nursing Eyes Expansion

The School of Nursing is unveiling plans for the largest expansion in its 75-year history: a 19,500-square-foot addition to create the new, $6.6 million Loretta C. Ford Education Wing, which will help the school increase its enrollment by 60 percent.

Improvements also include a high-tech auditorium, facilities for wireless computing, distance learning, and laptop docking stations.

Groundbreaking is set to begin in October, and the new wing is expected to be completed in late summer 2005.

The expansion is part of the school’s response to a nationwide shortage of nurses, a trend that is projected to worsen in coming years. By 2008, some estimates project a shortage of about 575,000 nurses.

The additional space will allow the school’s Accelerated Nursing Program, which enables people with bachelor’s degrees to become nurses in as little as one year, to double in size to about 100 students. Many of the students in the program are displaced workers looking to enter the profession. In the first year of enrollment in 2002, student backgrounds included the computer industry, engineering, business, health care, and other professions.

The school also expects to hire 10 new faculty members as part of the expansion plans, which helps address a related shortage of qualified nursing faculty to educate nurses.

The school announced this spring that a capital campaign is under way to raise $13.3 million for the expansion and to help fund new centers, including a Center for Nursing Entrepreneurship and a Center for Aging.

The capital campaign also will help fund scholarships, faculty chairs, additional renovations to the existing Helen Wood Hall building that houses the school, community nursing programs, and several research and practice centers within the school.

The new wing is named in honor of the school’s founding dean, Loretta Ford ’00 (HNR), one of the inventors of the field of nurse practitioner.