Elevated Care

BizTUCSONApril 4, 2025

3 minutes read

Pima Community College Opens $33 Million Health Professions Complex

By Tiffany Kjos

Pima Community College’s new $33 million Center of Excellence in Health Professions aims to address the healthcare worker shortage that has been growing at an alarming rate, leading to patient backlogs, frustration and sometimes less-than-timely care.

The four-story, three-building complex consolidates all 17 medical specialties taught at PCC, including respiratory therapy, nursing, home health, and fitness and wellness, at the West Campus. It also will double the number of students it graduates, increasing capacity from 800 to 1,600, within five years.

It’s impossible to understate that impact. “Those 800 students we graduate each year, if they see on average five patients a day, that’s 4,000 patient contacts a day for that one group of students, and 20,000 patient contacts a week, and over a million patient contacts a year,” said PCC Health Professions Dean Don Martin. “So, when we say that we touch the lives of Pima County we mean it, because Pima County’s population is just over a million people.”

The center includes classrooms, simulators and various high-tech labs featuring $2.5 million worth of HUD-funded equipment, all designed to replicate the real world.

“Part of what makes an education in Pima’s health professions special is the opportunity to work on equipment that is similar, if not exactly the same, as what students who are moving from the Center of Excellence into a job would be working on,” said Marcy Euler, president and CEO of Pima Foundation, which continues to raise money to equip the center.

Most of the construction costs for the new center – approximately $24 million – were paid when the college issued revenue bonds in 2019. PCC received another $2.5 million from congressional funding, thanks to U.S. Senator Mark Kelly and then-Senator Kyrsten Sinema.

The facility was built by gutting, renovating and expanding existing space, Euler said. Construction began in October 2023, and the college celebrated its opening with a ribbon-cutting in January attended by 250 people. “Everyone that we talked with at the event was incredibly impressed by the facility, by the rethinking of how training is done and the consolidation of the spaces, creating simulation rooms that allow for the student learners to actually engage in a way that is similar to a hospital or a clinical setting,” Euler said.

Unique for the 81,000-square-foot center are the HyFlex classrooms, which allow students to attend classes in person, virtually, or a combination of both. The classrooms are equipped with multiple microphones and video cameras so everyone, in the classroom or online, can see and interact.

“You know when you have a Google meeting or a Zoom meeting, only one person can talk at a time because it will cut you off? In a HyFlex environment, that doesn’t happen,” Martin explained. “It is fully two-way so you can have a full, genuine conversation like you would face-to-face.”

This flexible setup is especially beneficial in health sciences, where attendance is crucial, Martin said. “In health sciences, it’s really difficult to miss one or two classes because it’s hard to catch up. This way you can go to classes one week, then do it online the next week – it’s exactly the same.”

Students come to PCC from various backgrounds: out of high school, from the medical field seeking advancement, and transitioning from other fields. “A lot of these individuals come from low socioeconomic status or unstable jobs,” he said. “Healthcare provides good stability with good pay, and that impacts their local community, their neighborhoods, their families and the larger community in general because it raises the economic status of the entire community.”

The center itself employs about 63 full-time staff members and faculty, plus adjunct and part-time faculty. Before the center was established, faculty and students were dispersed across the Desert Vista and West campuses, often in separate locations, making resource sharing and collaboration challenging, Martin said. “The center gave us the opportunity to concentrate all of them in one place where we can start doing interprofessional education, where the students can work together across the boundaries.”

While the program focuses on student development, Euler emphasized the broader mission: “The health care needs of our community are really important for everyone. When you go to a doctor or a nurse you want to make sure that their training is such that you are getting the absolute best care possible. And I firmly believe that the Center for Excellence in Health Professions is going to provide that level of care in our community for decades to come.”