Perspectives Spring 2015

PERSPECTIVES • SPRING 2015 5 In recent months, there have been nu- merous communications emanating from NSU President Dr. George Han- bury, the various deans, myself, and others in regard to NSU’s Vision 2020 and the bright future that lays ahead for our university. For the past several years, we have been transitioning from an educational institu- tion that provides quality education to one that is striving to provide nationally recognized and preeminent education. Similarly, there has been much talk about our emphasis on research, which is yield- ing some significant results. All you have to do is drive into the uni- versity directly past the Health Professions Division to bear witness to the sophisti- cated and rapidly rising 225,000 square- foot Center for Collaborative Research that will help us meet our goals of becom- ing a highly productive and recognized re- search university. It isn’t the bricks and mortar that count, however. It is what we intend the bricks and mortar to accom- plish in regard to the educational goals set forth by Dr. Hanbury’s Vision 2020 strategic plan. On a similar note, the assemblage of knowledge we are presenting to the world, and the creation of new methods of care based upon the discovery of new knowledge that comes from research, in- dicate that we are on the cusp of achiev- ing great things. This is why the bricks and mortar that will comprise the new research center are symbolic of what is about to happen here. It’s not that we haven’t been involved in research for years, because we have. Consequently, I give a lot of credit to the many researchers that have been working at NSU for years with a significant amount of success, but not with all the tools that are necessary for them to have this broad spectrum of opportunity and presentation of information. The progress, however, does not stop there. If you shift your view southward from the Health Professions Division to neighboring University Park Plaza, you will see the initial elements of a hospital complex being constructed. The first step in this process is an emerging emergency room/urgent care center that the Hospi- tal Corporation of America (HCA) is es- tablishing on the south parking lot of University Park Plaza, which is really the intent of HCA to place its footprint on this acreage for the purposes of transfer- ring a 54-year-old hospital named Planta- tion General to our campus. In December, many of you heard about the first big step in this process, which involved the approval by the Agency for Health Care Administration that Plantation General Hospital should be given the opportunity under state statute to relocate to the NSU campus, thus creating a new 200-bed hospital on this campus that will surround the emergency room that is currently under construction. Thanks to these exciting developments, we are now looking at the elements of not only research, but also at the compo- nents of knowledge and compatibility of this knowledge with the new methods of caring for a person’s health. From a health care perspective, this relates to the palliation of pain, the experience of elon- gating someone’s life, and providing pa- tients with a sense of better health, which in the long term means saving lives. Ultimately, what are we really looking at now when we discuss Nova Southeast- ern University? First and foremost, we see the goals of becoming a preeminent institution based on the knowledge and capabilities our graduates possess. Of course, we want our faculty members and our academic infrastructure to be recog- nized as exceptional as well. The primary goal, however, is to seed this knowledge in the minds of our graduates who received their education at an institution that now has a very significant research component and a very significant research medical hospital looming on the horizon. We have become an outstanding uni- versity that provides quality education, comprehensive health care, and cutting- edge research discoveries, which, when viewed in their totality, add up to a bet- ter humanity. CHANCELLOR’S COMMUNIQUÉ “...the assemblage of knowledge we are presenting to the world, and the creation of new methods of care based upon the discovery of new knowledge that comes from research, indicate that we are on the cusp of achieving great things.” Frederick Lippman, R.Ph., Ed.D., Health Professions Division Chancellor