Science complexMinister for Health and Children Mary Harney welcomed the largest single investment in a facility for the education of health professionals since the foundation of the State when she officially opened the €45 million teaching facility at University College Cork.
Ms Harney said the Brookfield Health Sciences Complex was the biggest integrated health teaching facility in the State, and represented one of the most significant infrastructural investments in the Irish third-level sector in recent years.
The 12,000sq m complex, which stands on a 4.5-acre site of the old Brookfield House on College Road, provides accommodation for the schools of nursing and mid-wifery, medicine and clinical therapies and will be used by more than 1,800 students.
Among those who will use the facility are around 800 nursing students, about 600 medical students, 200 clinical therapy students as well as research students in these schools and some 200 pharmacy students who will use the complex's teaching rooms and library.
The nursing school which has more than 1,000 students will replace five schools previously distributed among the acute hospitals in Cork while the medical school has been housed in scattered substandard buildings for many years with a severe lack of teaching facilities.
The Brookfield complex has been designed for an annual intake of 150 medical students which represents a doubling in capacity in line with anticipated demand for additional places for Irish graduates through direct and graduate entry programmes medicine.
It will also cater for an annual intake of 25 students in occupational therapy and a further 25 students in speech and language therapy with the first of these students due to graduate in 2007, which will help address the severe shortage of therapists nationally.
The complex is funded from a combination of sources with funding for the nursing school coming from the Department of Health and Children, funding for the medical school coming from a Medical Faculty Development Fund and the therapies from the Higher Education Authority.
The centre also includes a creche, catering for 80 children, which is jointly funded by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and UCC, while the entire project also benefited from a significant private donation.
The five-storey building also provides state-of-the-art clinical training facilities, a health sciences library, a 200-seat restaurant as well as a suite of clinic rooms where Health Services Executive speech and language therapists provide a clinical services for patients.
It will also include clinical skills laboratories incorporating simulated hospital wards, a phonetics laboratory, a high spec audiology booth and a pathology teaching laboratory combining the latest computer technology with microscopic work.
UCC president Gerard Wrixon said that the new complex reflected the increasing diversity in health education with the university now offering the most diversified portfolio of health education degree programmes in the State.
"This includes medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, midwifery, public health and health promotion, occupational therapy and speech and language therapy," said Prof Wrixon at last week's opening ceremony.
"UCC also has a wide range of post-graduate specialist diplomas and degrees," he said.
"The underpinning philosophy in the development of Brookfield has been to maximise integrated education of health professionals through shared facilities and the sharing of professional staff," he said.
Prof Wrixon said the Brookfield project was the latest in a range of major capital projects being undertaken by UCC with the new €25 million School of Pharmacy, the only such school outside Dublin, now operational and aiming to be fully completed in January 2006.