Foundation donates $5 million for medical facility

Alison Calkins

Wednesday, Oct. 30, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

The University of Nevada School of Medicine has received $5 million from the Del E. Webb Foundation.

It's the foundation's largest-ever donation and will be used to build a new 60,000-square-foot medical education and patient care center on 10 acres donated by the city between Columbia Sunrise Mountain View Medical Center and Sierra Health Services at Cheyenne Avenue and U.S. 95.

The new facility will include a community health and wellness center to provide health and lifestyle programs for Southern Nevada residents as well as full-service outpatient care such as family medicine, well-baby clinics, and diagnosis and follow-up for surgical patients.

Dean Robert Daugherty said it's time that the School of Medicine has a home of its own in Las Vegas.

"For many years, we have trained our medical students and medical residents in teaching hospitals ... but health care has changed and physicians today try to keep people out of hospitals, which now only have two kinds of patients -- those who are sick for a short time and those who are very sick," he said, adding that the system no longer provides enough experience for students.

"The student doesn't get to know the patient or family and see how the diagnosis was made ... (our new) building will be what I call the medical school's clinical classroom."

That classroom includes space -- larger examining rooms with areas for a student or resident as well as the patient and doctor, conference space near the examining rooms, offices for doctors and for places for clinical research.

The facility is the first phase of the school's Southern Nevada campus and will be named the Del E. Webb Medical Education Center. It's expected to be completed within 18 to 24 months.

St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Henderson will also get a $120,000 donation from the foundation. The grant will be used for a "C-Arm," a high-tech piece of equipment that allows X-rays to be taken while a patient is in surgery.

Since 1986, the foundation has donated more than $500,000 to St. Rose Dominican for other projects.

The foundation is a private, self-funded, nonprofit charitable corporation designed to promote public educational and scientific work in Arizona, California and Nevada -- incorporated in 1961 by Del Webb.

It is not affiliated with the publicly-held Del Webb Corp. or its communities.

The foundation's first project was building the Walter O. Boswell Hospital in the original Sun City northwest of Phoenix.

Since then, the foundation has been involved with multiple projects including a major contribution to the Cancer Center at the University of Arizona, the Proton Treatment Facility at Loma Linda Medical Center and funding for the Del E. Webb School of Construction at Arizona State University.