As of spring 2010, UC Davis students will no longer turn to the Cowell Student Health Center for their medical needs.
Instead, they will be able to go to the Health and Wellness Center that is currently under construction on the west side of La Rue Road, just opposite from the Activities and Recreation Center and adjacent to The Colleges at La Rue.
At 48,000 square feet and three stories tall, the new Health and Wellness Center will be double the size of the current facility. The total project cost for the Health and Wellness Center is $50,300,000 and is student-funded.
“The [Cowell Student Health Center] is terribly outdated with spaces that were never built for the current workload or style of outpatient health care now being delivered to our students on campus,” said Michelle Famula, a physician and director of the Cowell Student Health Center, in a 2007 press release.
Construction of the new center began last May and is scheduled to be completed in the spring of 2010.
“Our new building will have better space utilization, better accommodation of patient care workflow and workload, better design to utilize current medical and information technology, as well as facilitate electronic medical record systems, and be a more structurally welcoming and comfortable facility for patients as well as employees,” she said in the press release.
The health center needed to be upgraded and students voted to have fees increased in order to build this replacement for future students, said Jill Tomczyk, the senior project manager for the new center.
Many aspects – such as program growth, the size of the current facility, how the program functions currently, how it has to get “shoe-horned” into a building that isn’t large enough for it and what kinds of services students are needing and perhaps not getting – were taken into consideration when designing the new center, Tomczyk said.
“We co-located several different units that are in satellite offices now,” she said.
The new facility will have a department dedicated to wellness care that has more to do with eating right and taking care of oneself from a lifestyle point of view, not just from a physical health point of view, she said.
A portion of Counseling and Psychological Services will also move into the new center, she said.
The construction of the new facility required the relocation of the outdoor basketball courts and the arboretum nursery.
To watch the progress of the construction, go to ae.ucdavis.edu/webcams/HWCCam.htm.
POOJA DEOPURA can be reached at campus@theaggie.org.
