Reposted from U of U Health’s Good Notes blog.

This month, medical students are walking through the doors of the new Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine building for the first time. They’ll see sunlight pouring into the atrium and classmates already gathered in study spaces. Down the hall, faculty and staff are settling into offices beside colleagues they’ve worked with for years but rarely crossed paths with on a normal day.

That moment will have been many years in the making.

For much of its history, the M.D. program has been scattered across campus. Students attended class in one building and studied in another. Faculty and administrators worked out of offices spread across several more.

We made it work but never had one place for everyone to call home. Now, we do.

For the first time, our whole medical school community will share a building designed around students, with the hospitals, the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library and other schools and colleges only a short walk away.

A day in the life of our students and faculty

The easiest way to understand the new building is to picture an ordinary day inside it.

A student might begin the morning in a large learning studio, seated at a table surrounded by classmates rather than facing forward in rows. Together, they work through a patient case, thinking aloud and talking with each other as they propose a decision.

Later, the student joins a smaller group to study for an exam or practice interviewing a patient. The day might end in the anatomy lab, where they study tissues or specimens, enlightening aspects of a case they discussed that morning.

This collaborative, hands-on teaching style is not new to the M.D. curriculum. Having rooms built for it is. Until now, we’ve squeezed small-group, discussion-based learning into halls designed for large lectures. Now, the space matches the way we teach.

The building also closes the gap between students and the people supporting them. A faculty member can catch up with a student in common areas instead of setting up a formal meeting. Staff who used to email across buildings can sort something out in the same hallway.

Medical school days are long, and the building was made for that. Quiet study rooms, house gathering spaces, a wellness suite, dining areas and a family lounge make it feel less like a workplace and more like somewhere you want to be.

Preparation for day one of residency

When our graduates come back as residents, we often ask them one thing: did we prepare you well?

Our job as medical educators is to ensure students are ready long before they care for a real patient on their own. This building gives us even more resources to prepare them.

Entering an operating room for the first time can be overwhelming. A student may know the steps for scrubbing in and putting on a sterile gown, but it is different with a real patient on the operating table or a scrub nurse watching.

Students will now be able to practice that experience in a simulated OR. The simulation center also lets them work through the kinds of emergencies seen in intensive care or trauma settings. A flexible space can become an ambulance, an emergency department, or the site of a full mass-casualty exercise.

These simulated environments will allow students to learn from mistakes and try again before the stakes are high. And they’ll be supplemented by simulation resources already in the College of Nursing and the Eccles Health Sciences Education Building.

Training physicians to meet community needs

A $110 million gift from the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation and the Nora Eccles Treadwell Foundation helped bring this building to life, along with the hard work and generosity of many leaders, educators, alumni, faculty members and donors.

Such widespread support reveals how important this building is to both the medical school and the communities we serve.

Utah and the Mountain West keep growing. Preparing enough physicians to meet the demands of that growth means training more students and reaching them in more corners of the state.

This building is the home base for that work. Its technology will link students in Salt Lake City with a cohort of peers at the Southern Utah Regional Medical Campus in St. George and with training sites across the state. Its setting at the center of the health campus puts learning next door to the research and clinical care the rest of our work depends on.

The students who begin their medical journeys here will be among the best of the best. After graduation and residency, they will be ready to give their best to their patients. Some will go to rural towns and cities that have waited years for another doctor. Others will work in busy hospitals and clinics along the Wasatch Front. Still others may choose to practice outside of Utah.

Wherever they land, they’ll never forget how their journey started in an amazing place that is really a gift to people everywhere.