Molloy U nursing school opens new high-tech center

Molloy University has opened a new educational and training center for nurses and other health care workers.

The 20,000-square-foot center at 1100 N. Broadway in Amityville includes high-tech medical skills labs and simulation labs for its roughly 1,500 undergraduate and graduate nursing students. Its labs include robotic mannequins with simulated vital signs, allowing nursing students to practice clinical techniques.

The center also will provide continuing education classes in medical assisting, medical coding, addiction counseling, home inspection and other subjects, and a prep course for the Catholic high school entrance exam.

More than two dozen nursing students joined the university’s president, Jim Lentini, its provost Michelle Piskulich and the dean of the Barbara H. Hagan School of Nursing, Marcia Gardner, at a ribbon-cutting event at the facility on Monday.

The center will help students “develop the crucial competencies for nursing practice, with leading edge educational strategies and technologies, that will prepare nurses for the future health care environment,” Lentini said in a statement.

“It feels more like a real-life scenario,” nursing student Fabiola Matus of Hauppauge said in a statement. “We’ve progressed so much with medical technology that lets us practice. This brings us closer to what working in a hospital would be like.”

By Maura McDermott

maura.mcdermott@newsday.commauramcdermott

Maura McDermott covers health care and other business news on Long Island.