LIMA — Mercy Health-St. Rita’s Medical Center celebrated adding the final steel support beam needed to erect its new 48,000-square-foot graduate-focused training facility located on Market Street during a brief ceremony Wednesday.
Slated for completion in early June 2021, the $15 million Graduate Medical Education Center will act as a small simulated hospital and school for future students of Mercy Health’s in-development graduate program. Project Manager Dave Faulkner said by the time the building is completed and the program reaches full capacity, just over 100 graduate students of varying medical professions will use the facility to simulate hospital scenarios.
With the beam now in place, passersby can see the outline of the building. Standing at three stories, the facility will feature a library, a 250-seat auditorium, a computer lab, five classrooms and four simulation labs that mimic what graduates my find working in the hospital.
The four labs will replicate a surgery suite, an emergency department, a family medicine room and a procedure room for the prospective doctors.
In the same way that pilots simulate flight before taking to the air to earn their license, Faulkner said simulation areas will help provide the training hours necessary to be medical staff.
For example, some rooms will feature specialized mannequins that replicate biological feedback.
“They will practice on those before ever touching a patient,” Faulkner said.
During the brief steel beam-raising ceremony, a number of hospital staff and executives signed their names on the beam with markers. After Mercy Health Lima President Ronda Lehman and Faulkner congratulated the hospital team for their work in making the medical center a reality, construction workers eventually placed the signed beam on the second floor near the future auditorium.
“We need to celebrate these fun times, especially right now,” Faulkner said. “We got a lot of work today, but let’s get this beam signed and make some progress.”
Mercy Health’s graduate center is just one of the two medical training buildings currently under construction in downtown Lima. Roughly a mile east, the Rhodes State Center of Health Science Education and Innovation is expected to be finished by August 2021.
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