Gordon E. Inman Center
The newly completed Gordon E. Inman Center houses the Gordon E. Inman College of Health Sciences & Nursing, and will include the University's nursing, social work, occupational and physical therapy programs.
The facility bears the name of Gordon E. Inman, one of Middle Tennessee's most successful bankers, real estate developers, entrepreneurs and business leaders. His generous donation of $10.5 million is the largest single gift in Belmont University's history. Support from Inman, along with $7.5 million from HCA's TriStar Health System division, will help Belmont make a sizeable dent in the acute shortage of nurses and other health care professionals in Tennessee, the Southeast and the nation.
By 2020, Tennessee is projected to have only half the number of RNs needed. The data indicate there is an existing shortage in Tennessee of almost 7,000 nurses; according to the latest projects from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than one million new nurses will be needed by 2012. With an increase in nursing student enrollment from 250 to 600, Belmont will have a substantial effect on the nursing crisis for the next 50 years, alleviating the shortage and boosting the economy through earnings of nurses.
Special Features of the Gordon E. Inman Center
- An embedded apartment in the Inman building will allow occupational therapy and social work students to observe home activities and evaluate if a home is safe, especially for senior living safety issues.
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The first “patient” students will work on
will be a $29,000 “Sim Man” who breathes,
responds to touch and other basic stimuli.
- The Inman Building will have a unique Peri-Operative Learning Room that will provide a recreated surgical room exposing students to the responsibilities they will eventually be expected to assume. While they may not perform surgery, nurses spend more time in the operating room than doctors, caring for patients before, during and after surgery.
- The Inman Center will reproduce hospital “Clean Utility Rooms” to provide nursing students with an opportunity to learn the fiscal connection between the costs of care and direct nursing care. Equipment will be bar-coded so that students will have an understanding of the fiscal connection with care.
- The Acute Care Lab contains hospital beds, Meditech terminals and computers that are used to document the assigned skill after performing it in lab. In the ACL, students will have the opportunity to learn skills needed in intensive care units. This real-life space will be used for classroom demonstration and clinical simulation.
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The Inman Center will house a “birthing bed”
that has a simulator to enable students to learn how to
“catch” babies.
The room will also include a warmer,
postpartum bed, two rocking chairs and a pediatric crib, all
designed to promote patient safety.
Pediatric and Maternity clinical sites are
scarce learning resources in hospitals.
- The Media Tech Room in the Inman building has everything students need to help fashion the everyday objects we use without thought. Here future occupational therapists will learn splinting, woodworking, casting, leatherworking and other skills that will teach OTs how to modify the simplest of household items.
- The Inman building will include multiple models of sinks equipped of every type of water-control a health professional might encounter – those operated by hands, elbows, knees and feet. Prevention of infection continues to be a major safety issue in health care.
- OTs and PTs will be able to assist children with physical and
developmental challenges by using suspensions systems to aid with
balance and walking.
Further, as play is the work of children,
OTs and PTs will work with finger paints, dough and specially
crafted pencils and pens to improve children’s
coordination and writing skills.
Children have a home in the Inman
building, too.
To make a gift online to the Gordon E. Inman College of Health Sciences & Nursing, click here.
