Report: URI, RIC should share nursing facility

WARWICK – The University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College should share a nursing building in the Providence Jewelry District, education officials have told the General Assembly.
The R.I. Board of Governors for Higher Education delivered the recommendation to lawmakers Tuesday evening after conducting a roughly nine-month-long study. Lawmakers had requested the study after rejecting a similar plan last year.
The reports says that a new, shared 127,000-square-foot facility in the city’s fledgling Knowledge District would reduce costs, grow enrollment and put students closer to the state’s major health care institutions.
“Both the RIC and URI Nursing programs would benefit considerably from sharing state-of-the-art space that is designed with the most modern technology available for nursing education,” the report says. “In addition, such a facility would be more economically viable than constructing two, separate nursing facilities each containing the same level of simulation and ‘Smart Hospital’ technology.”
Three years ago, both schools had proposed building new buildings on their respective campuses. At the time, URI estimated the cost of its building at $50 million and RIC pegged its costs at $30 million.
In March 2010, then-Gov. Donald L. Carcieri proposed a $60 million bond issue to build a 121,000-square-foot nursing center in the Jewelry District in an effort to save money. The concept had been recommended by the Board of Governors.
But the idea faced opposition from nursing faculty at RIC worried about their program losing autonomy. Carcieri’s proposal never made it on the ballot.
Things have now changed, RIC President Nancy Carriuolo said in an interview on Wednesday. Carriuolo said the nine months taken to prepare the study had provided time to address concerns of faculty.
“This study gave us the time to have those discussions,” she said.
Under the recommended scenario, RIC and URI will maintain separate nursing programs and their faculty will remain distinct. Both schools will also keep their existing nursing facilities and renovate them, however to a far lesser extent than proposed three years ago.
The advanced simulators and training labs the schools had once imagined on their own campuses will instead go in a shared center in Providence.
“There’s a great deal of synergies and shared costs” that would be realized, said Lorne A. Adrain, chairman of the Board of Governors.
A joint center will sharply reduce overall costs. The report estimates a shared facility would cost between $60.1 million and $67.3 million depending on the financing. Even with the additional $5.1 million for repairs at existing facilities the overall cost would be less than the $79.2 million cost of separate buildings.
The report makes no recommendation on the best way to finance the project. The state could issue bonds to pay for the building. Another option would have URI and RIC become the anchor tenants for a privately financed building that would likely sit close to where Brown University is constructing its new medical school.
The private-public option is attractive because it would spur private investment while keeping the building on the city’s tax rolls, Rhode Island Commissioner for Higher Education Ray DiPasquale said.
The commissioner said officials had seen such concepts work in places like Baltimore and Houston where development has sprung up around health care education facilities.
“A lot of people see this as a real possibility to stimulate the economy,” DiPasquale said, pointing to letters of support from the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce and local hospital executives.
A new facility, the report adds, would also stimulate the URI and RIC nursing programs bursting at the seams.
Carriuolo and URI President David Dooley said both their programs desperately need more space to accommodate huge demand. Time is of the essence, Dooley said, because of a nationwide shortage of nurses.
“The longer we delay, the worse it gets,’ he said.
The report estimates that a shared facility would increase undergraduate nursing enrollment at URI 32 percent to 925 students by 2019. Graduate enrollment at the school would nearly triple to 249.
At Rhode Island College, undergraduates would increase 76 percent to 820 while graduate enrollment would rise 350 percent to 150.
Not in the cards, the university presidents said, is merging the programs. Dooley said such a fusion would save little in the end because the schools would still need the same facilities and the same faculty.
Administrators added that the programs cater to different students. RIC tends to serve a lower-income population and many students that live at home during college. URI tends to attract a broader range of students looking for a more traditional campus environment.
“It’s about offering choice to the consumer, the student in this case, and letting them access their own learning objectives,” Adrain said.
Students also will continue to have a third option with the Community College of Rhode Island’s nursing program. DiPasquale, who doubles as the college’s president, said that program would not directly join the building. The school, he said, already has sufficient room for its program and no plans to grow it.
That does not mean, however, that CCRI students would not use the new building from time to time, DiPasquale said.

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