There’s a running joke among Las Vegas locals.
Where do you go for great healthcare?
The airport.
The dark humor highlights the fact that many local residents have to travel to California and other states for healthcare because Nevada ranks 48th nationally for primary care physicians per capita and 49th for general surgeons.
Roseman University of Health Sciences hopes to help change that.
The private, nonprofit university — which started its College of Medicine MD program last year — plans to begin construction later this year on a new Medical Simulation Building on its Summerlin campus.
The three-story facility will be one of the region’s most advanced simulation-based training centers and the first building of Roseman’s $500 million three-phase plan to expand its Summerlin location to a full-fledged medical school campus.
“I hate to use the word ‘game changer,’ but it is for the health and well-being of Southern Nevada,” said Doug Dawes, Roseman’s vice president for business and finance, who is overseeing the project. “It’s going to be the most state-of-the-art facility in the Intermountain West.”
The 84,290-square-foot building will house a full simulated hospital environment, including an intensive care unit, patient rooms, trauma and labor and delivery suites, and two operating rooms.
It also will include an outpatient objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) center, specialized skills and health assessment labs, a digital anatomy lab with digital dissection and imaging tables, an engineering lab/maker space, resuscitation quality improvement (RQI) labs, and a simulated home setting.
The building will feature a multistation retail pharmacy as well where students can practice patient counseling and community-based care in a realistic setting.
The design emphasizes interprofessional education, with medical students training side by side with students from Roseman’s College of Nursing and College of Pharmacy.
“This brings everybody under one roof,” Dawes said. “We really like the interdisciplinary type of arrangement where there’s those serendipitous interactions that occur between nurses, pharmacists and our MD students.
“So they will all have a little bit more awareness when they get out in the field how to interact with one another.”
The facility will also feature a rooftop garden/event space overlooking a planned campus quad and have a room for moulage, which is the art of applying special effects makeup and fake injuries to a simulated patient for training.
“They’re not real patients. We pay for these actors to come in and participate in this education,” Dawes said. “We’ll rush them in and then our medical students get to work with these patients, and everything they’re doing is recorded, so the students get to look and see what they did right and what they could have done better.”
Roseman welcomed its first class of future physicians in July 2025, when 64 members were honored at the school’s inaugural white coat ceremony, including 15 from Nevada.
“So we anticipate those Nevadans to stay,” Dawes said. “We hope that when folks come here to get educated, they fall in love with Las Vegas and they stay in Las Vegas.”
‘Huge need’
At its capacity, the building, which is expected to cost $65-$70 million, will serve 400 medical students, or 100 per cohort. It also will serve approximately 200 students in its three-year pharmacy program and more than 300 students in its 18-month nursing program, which includes nurse anesthetists.
“There’s a huge need for anesthesiology professionals,” Dawes said.
Dr. Rebecca Edgeworth, the only practicing physician serving in the Nevada Assembly, agrees.
“We definitely need more physicians, for sure, but we’re also short on nurses and every other medical profession you can think of,” she said.
Edgeworth is a professor at Touro University Nevada, which also has a medical school — the College of Osteopathic Medicine (DO) — and a medical simulation facility at its Henderson campus.
“Having a simulation center really is the wave of the future,” she said. “So that the first time we incubate someone isn’t on a person, it’s on a device that we can make mistakes and we can be watched while we’re doing it. That should result in better outcomes for people, and the students will get more training, and they’ll be more confident when they’re doing procedures.”
Master plan
Roseman has already received design approval from Summerlin for the project, which is scheduled to go before the Clark County Commission on Aug. 19 for approval.
“Roseman University’s next phase of growth in Summerlin is an important milestone not only for the university, but for our community and Southern Nevada’s future,” Jose Bustamante, president of the Nevada Region for Howard Hughes, said in a statement. “This is about more than a new building. It is about advancing healthcare education, preparing the next generation of medical professionals, and creating opportunities that will have a lasting impact on the region.
“Projects like this help diversify our economy, elevate our talent base, and advance Southern Nevada’s pillars of growth.”
The building will sit along Discovery Drive, located just off the 215 Beltway at Town Center Drive, adjacent to the existing Discovery, Innovation and Breakthrough buildings on campus.
“We’re hoping for a soft groundbreaking in early December,” Dawes said.
If all goes according to plan, Dawes said the new building will be completed by the spring of 2028.
The next step in the school’s Summerlin master campus plan is to bring over its pharmacy and nursing programs from its Henderson campus and build an interdisciplinary classroom building.
“This is a little different than most institutions. Most institutions have the College of Medicine building, the College of Pharmacy building and the College of Nursing building,” Dawes said. “We’re breaking down those walls and those silos because everything’s interdisciplinary.”
After the classroom building is done, Dawes said the plan is to build the student union. That will be followed by a parking garage and an auditorium that will serve not only Roseman but the Summerlin community.
The College of Veterinary Medicine is under development at Roseman’s Henderson campus. The American Veterinary Medical Association Council on Education has officially scheduled a site visit in January, which is an important step toward accreditation.
The full expansion of the Summerlin campus will generate nearly $1.9 billion in total economic impact by 2032, according to a 2023 report, as well as support 10,624 jobs and generate $37.5 million in tax revenue.
“That provides some good numbers for what this campus will mean for the community as it continues to grow,” Dawes said. “It’s part of our mission. To impact the communities where we serve.”
Contact reporter Todd Dewey at tdewey@reviewjournal.com. Follow @tdewey33 on X.
