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MOMENTUM
A Web Letter from the Office of the Provost - August 2019

By Mary Jane Chew

Across Our Campus

Purdue celebrates huge step forward toward a new veterinary hospital

After many years of dreaming and planning, a new $108 million veterinary teaching hospital is moving forward. Dean Willie Reed has been laying the groundwork and developing plans for the new facility since 2007, through three presidents and six provosts. The 12-year path has had many twists and turns but this summer the final administrative step was taken: approval by the Purdue Board of Trustees to plan, finance, develop and award construction contracts.

This fall, site work will be underway near the college's Lynn Hall to move utility lines that run from the Wade Utility Plant to the rest of campus. Meanwhile, Foil Wyatt Architects and Planners and Flad Architects will move from conceptual designs (see image) to renderings of the actual buildings. Groundbreaking and construction, managed by Pepper Construction of Jackson, Mississippi, will begin in March 2020, with completion the following year.

The breakthrough came this spring when President Mitch Daniels announced that the Indiana General Assembly had agreed to fund $73 million toward a $108 million new hospital. Purdue will make up the remaining $35 million, of which Reed and his team needs to raise $8 million.

The new hospital complex will include three facilities east of Lynn Hall and north of Wade:

  • A small animal hospital — 62,000 gross square feet in addition to about 30,000 gross square feet already in Lynn Hall.
  • An equine hospital — 78,000 gross square feet.
  • A farm animal hospital, which will replace the large animal hospital — 24,000 gross square feet.

Although housed separately, horses and small animals will share expensive imaging technology, as they do now.

In less than 10 years, the hospital caseload has grown from 13,332 in FY2010 to 20,016 in FY 2018, an increase greater than 50 percent. With the added space, the hospital will be better equipped to meet demand and expand its caseload.

"Now sometimes there is a six-week wait to get an animal in for a non-emergency operation such as an orthopedic procedure," Reed said, "so that will significantly improve."

The new facility also will address the hospitals' accreditation status, currently probationary pending improvement of its facilities. Student enrollment, however, cannot change, he said, until labs and classroom facilities in Lynn are remodeled and expanded — Phase 2 on the college's master plan.



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