El Centro College Center for Allied Health and Nursing
(located in the Paramount Building, downtown Dallas)
- The state-of-the-art facility provides realistic, hands-on experience for students as they prepare for clinical training. Students are better prepared for their clinical experience because they receive feedback from clinical preceptors who assist them.
- The building was designed with skills-based laboratories instead of program-based labs; this design provides students with experience in daily “open labs.” This configuration gives students the opportunity to have ample practice time (beyond scheduled lab hours) to hone their clinical skills.
- Students who are prepared in El Centro’s allied health and nursing programs can assist area residents with their needs by participating in community-based activities, such as: health screening activities, Sister-to-Sister Day (an American Heart Association screening event), Muscular Dystrophy Camp, the Arthritis Foundation booth at the Texas state fair, and other events.
- In partnership with Parkland Hospital, obstetric patients are referred to the diagnostic medical sonography program for no-cost sonograms.
- High-tech patient simulators provide clinical scenarios that students often do not receive in traditional clinical experiences, especially in pediatric and obstetric clinics.
- The state-of-the-art facility provides touring high school groups with an opportunity to see themselves in health careers with the training provided by a community college education. They learn that lucrative job opportunities in health care are attainable without a four-year or medical school degree.
- The facility provides El Centro’s hospital partners with a venue for staff and in-service training and for new product demonstrations by medical equipment vendors.
- Because the laboratory designs are skills-based, students from various health care programs work and interact side by side, supporting each other in the same lab. This approach, in turn, supports the “health care team” approach that hospitals use; it also supports and enhances the allied health and nursing core curriculum concept in health care, which recently was recognized by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board as the single exemplary program in the state (including universities) that supports the core curriculum/team approach to educating the health care workforce.