City of Palm Springs donates $1 million to California State University San Bernardino Palm Desert campus

Public Record, The, Aug 7, 2007

In an effort to help alleviate the nursing shortage in the Coachella Valley and across the nation and to help promote a better understanding of environmental issues facing the Coachella Valley the City of Palm Springs has charitably donated from the City's Solid Waste Diversion Fund $1 million to the Palm Desert Campus of California State University San Bernardino.

The contribution, which will be used for a trio of educational efforts, will help finance construction of the new Health

Sciences Building at the Palm Desert Campus. This 23,000-squre-foot building will house biology and chemistry labs, the campus student health center, and, most importantly, a nursing lab and classrooms, the foundation that is essential to begin to alleviate the nursing shortage. In return for the contribution, the University has agreed to name the primary biology lab in the new Health Sciences Building the "Palm Springs Biology Laboratory."

The money will be used not just to create a building but create an opportunity to train nurses not only for the Coachella Valley but also for the country.

"The City's contribution will help provide a service to both current and future residents of not only Palm Springs but all of the Coachella Valley," said Mayor Ron Oden. "We share a common responsibility with our sister cities and must insure that the region has the necessary facilities of higher education to properly prepare our youth for the future. Higher education helps level the playing field and provides an opportunity to transform lives. It is a privilege for the City of Palm Springs to play a role in that transformation."

Although the focus of the new Health Sciences Building will be primarily on nursing, the University will also offer course work in biology, chemistry, and the environment.

Underscoring the need for nursing education is the fact that in the Coachella Valley alone, there were more than 100 vacant nurse positions in the Valley's three acute hospitals, according to a survey conducted by the Institute of Critical Care Medicine in May 2004. Though there appears to be a significant reserve of applicants for nursing positions, the Institute found that there are not enough nursing schools and openings in the schools to accommodate these applicants.

In the Coachella Valley, College of the Desert has been the sole school for educating nursing students at the entry level. COD regularly receives more than several hundred applications annually for about 80 seats tavailable in the associate nursing program.

California, which ranks 49th among the 50 states in the number of registered nurses, has about 198,530 full-time registered nurses, about 539 per 100,000 residents, according to the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences. California's nurse shortage will worsen each year through 2030 and shortages will range between 6,872 and 21,161 full-time registered nurses, according to the report. The shortage of qualified professional nurses is a major reason for medical errors, and therefore, for almost 100,000 preventable deaths that occur annually in the United States, according to the report, which the Federal Government commissioned.

In addition to building the new Health Sciences Building, the City's financial gift will also be used to create the Palm Springs Environmental Scholarship Fund, which will provide a $3,600 annual scholarship to a senior from the Palm Springs Unified School District who has been accepted to the University and plans to pursue major course work in the environmental health sciences or related field.

"This endowment will allow us to create innovative academic programs to study our unique desert environment and the challenges it faces," said University Dean Fred Jandt.

Jandt noted that all nine of the cities in the Coachella Valley have made substantial donations for construction of various elements of the campus. He added that for the Health Sciences Building the university will be seeking the "Gold" level of the LEED Green Building Rating System (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) status.

LEED is the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of high performance green buildings. The program is administered by the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting more energy efficient and socially responsible building.