Ohio State University has plans in place to create a new, 35,000-square-foot, $17 million veterinary clinic on campus.
According to a request for qualifications filed with the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission, the new clinic – which was approved at the board of trustees meeting two weeks ago – would go up beside the school's recently remodeled $9.3 million laboratory on top of the the college's Veterinary Medical Center, on the corner of Vernon L. Tharp Street and Coffey Road.
According to the RFQ, in which the school is seeking an architect/engineer for the project, the Ohio State College of Veterinary Medicine sciences has graduated 9,100 veterinarians who practice in all 50 states and 40 countries. OSU's vet graduates make up 85% of the practicing veterinarians in Ohio.
The clinic will be officially dubbed The Frank Stanton Veterinary Spectrum of Care Clinic, named after the same family foundation that provided a $39 million donation to the college in 2016.
Roger Fingland, executive director and chief medical officer of the Veterinary Health System, told me this clinic will be a place for students to take their skills and apply them to real-world patients – in other words, live animals.
"The new lab (that opened this past fall) isn’t the hospital," he said. "It is not a place where patients go, it's a place where students use models to learn how to do procedures."
But, he said the new "spectrum of care clinic is a hospital – it will be where patients go to receive care."
Fingland said that the school currently offers this care to patients at its Veterinary Medical Center.
"This will be a relocation of an existing service to a much better facility to accomplish what we want to accomplish within the teaching mission," Fingland said.
The goal is to have the project completely by June 2021.
"And I'm very optimistic we will reach that goal," Fingland said.