BC3 to open state-of-the-art health care building

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BUTLER — Jason Adamson and Luke Veon measured each other’s leg lengths and arm heights near parallel bars, treatment tables and a hospital bed rigged with a patient lift.

Outside that laboratory, Victoria Clawson, Allison Coleman and Molly Grossman learned to navigate wheelchairs through a long hallway.

Across the hallway, Jaydn Best, Megan Brink and Lilli Schoettker sat aside a series of massage therapy tables and heard about the differences between neoplasia and hyperplasia, congenital disorders and chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

The Victor K. Phillips Nursing and Allied Health Building, the college’s new 25,000-square-foot immersive learning facility, “is state-of-the-art,” Barlow said. “Nothing like this is around here.”

Guests who attend a free community grand opening for the building from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Sept. 20 are “going to be impressed by the equipment, the space that we have here, all of the tools that the professors have to teach us,” Veon said.

The community grand opening will include a program from 3:30 to 4:10 p.m.

Speakers during the program will include Olivia Vissari, a BC3 registered nursing student; Dr. Patty Annear, dean of the college’s Shaffer School of Nursing and Allied Health, the academic division with the highest enrollment at BC3; and Dr. Nick Neupauer, president of BC3.

A ribbon-cutting will follow, as will tours of the building and catered refreshments such as beef empanadas, arancini, chicken satay and mini Reuben sandwiches.

Enrollment in BC3’s health care programs has increased 173 percent since fall 2008, when a building dedicated to nursing and allied health first appeared on the college’s master plan.

In fall 2008, the college’s health care programs enrolled 186 students. Classes were held in 8,000 square feet of BC3’s business and health professions building.

Nine years later, the college announced a $1 million gift from the Janice Phillips Larrick Family Charitable Trust toward construction of a new nursing and allied health facility. Over the next four years, gifts of $1 million followed from former state Sen. Tim Shaffer, Concordia Lutheran Ministries and an anonymous donor; and of $500,000 from Grove City College.

The BC3 Education Foundation as of Aug. 31 had received $6.75 million in private contributions and pledges from 111 donors toward the construction of the Victor K. Phillips Nursing and Allied Health Building.

Survey work, removal of trees and preparation for utilities began in February 2022. Construction costs for the Victor K. Phillips Nursing and Allied Health Building, and the adjacent Concordia Educational Center, were $14.8 million — half of which was matched by the state Department of Education.

The college also received $500,000 in federal funding for expenses that include technology. Among purchases to assist students are a pair of simulated patients for $110,000; and a system that records simulation scenarios for review with faculty members for $150,000.

BC3’s Shaffer School of Nursing and Allied Health as of Aug. 2 enrolled 508 students from at least 20 western Pennsylvania counties.

The facility includes three simulation rooms, one of which resembles an intensive care unit room; an area with four 70-inch flat screens on which registered nursing students can watch classmates addressing ailments of simulated patients; and patient room headwalls that include live or simulated oxygen, a vacuum and medical air.

A flyover by two medical helicopters is scheduled to take place at 5 p.m. during the community grand opening whose guests “are going to be wowed. I was when I first walked in,” said Paul Zacherl, a massage therapy student at BC3.

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