The beeping of the monitor slows, and the patient lies motionless in the hospital bed. Barbara McCamish springs into action, hooking up tubing to an oxygen dispenser, then securing the tubes so that oxygen flows into the patient’s nose.
The “patient” is actually a mannequin used by students in Dominican University’s nursing program. The technology is cutting edge, but the building in which it’s housed is 126 years old. It’s Meadowlands Hall, a converted 1888 Victorian mansion that once served as the summer home of Chronicle publisher Michael de Young.
The renovation of the 30,000-square-foot building took two years, cost around $12 million and tripled the amount of square footage dedicated to nursing and occupational therapy on campus. Officials plan a grand opening celebration Sept. 29, though Meadowlands was open for business Aug. 24, the first day of school.
“These programs were housed in five different buildings,” said Mary Marcy, president of the university. “Now they’re united.”
Marcy was sitting in what the cognoscenti refer to as “the hunt room,” the massive four-story building’s former dining room. Now used for meetings, the room’s olive wainscoting — preserved from the building’s original incarnation — is topped by five venerable murals, each depicting the stages of a fox hunt, from saddling up to running the fox to earth.
Bringing the programs together under one roof “invites formal and informal discussions,” Marcy said.
Indeed, outside on the deck with its view of Mount Tam, a group of students hotly debated the Big Bang theory.
Upstairs in the nursing department, McCamish, the clinical simulation center’s manager, unsnapped the mannequin’s blue shirt to display ports on the chest of “Sim Man,” as he’s called, “where you can put electrodes for checking his EKG rhythms,” she said. “He has pulses, he has vital signs. We can give him medication, start an IV, do chest compressions.”
Learning
The nursing department occupies the second, third and fourth floors, with two labs and four simulated hospital rooms. Several disembodied arms can be seen on a medical cart, while a torso with a single arm rests nearby.
“That’s ‘Chester Chest,’” comments a staff member.
“Argh!” Sim Man yells. It’s unclear whether he’s commenting on the unfortunate sobriquet attached to the torso, or just afflicted with pain. Simulated pain, that is.
“Oh, yes, he can speak,” McCamish said. “He can say what’s hurting him.” Practicing medical procedures on Sim Man and his fellow mannequins — eight other adults and two babies — gives students a chance to learn without running the risk of hurting a live patient, she said. “It’s all about learning in a safe environment.”
Dominican’s nursing and occupational programs now have about 500 students between the two programs. “It’s (health) a high-demand field. We will add a new physician’s assistant program in 2017,” Marcy said. The school also added a degree program in public health last year.
“This building was the first major gift to Dominican. In the 1920s, de Young donated it for $10,” Marcy said. The $8 million gift that got the renovation going, made by San Francisco restaurateur Rolf Lewis and his family, is one of the school’s largest-ever gifts, the president said.
Celebration
More than 300 individuals and foundations contributed money to pay for the renovations, Marcy said. The university did not borrow to fund the project.
Striding down the new carpet, university officials extolled the building’s green properties.
There are solar panels on the roof, and original materials were reused as much as possible during construction.
“All the windows and doors had to remain where they were,” said Jacques Charton, executive director of facility and auxiliary services at Dominican. The building meets the exacting standards necessary to qualify it for LEED gold certification, he said. The program is the U.S. Green Building Council’s measurement system for green homes, with gold being the second-highest level between silver and platinum.
Marcy said she’s looking forward to the Sept. 29 celebration.
“It’s our 125th year as an institution,” the president said. “Putting students at the center of what we do is in our 125 years of DNA.”
