Construction is set to begin on the new $26 million University Health Services building in early October.

Floor plans were finalized this summer for the building, tentatively named the Health and Counseling Services Building, Margaret Spear, director of University Health Services (UHS), said. The Penn State Board of Trustees approved the preliminary plans for the building in May.

The five-floor, 63,300-sq. ft. building is expected to be completed by May 1, 2008 and will be adjacent to the Career Services Building on Bigler Road, said Paul Ruskin, Office of Physical Plant spokesman.

This summer, a stretch of Bigler Road extending from the McCoy Natatorium toward Pollock Road was closed to enable underground facilities to be installed for the new

health services building. That project reached completion about a week before students returned to Penn State this fall, Ruskin said.

University Health Services is currently housed in the Ritenour Building, which was initially built as a hospital in 1929, when University Park enrollment was about 4,367.

Ellen Nagy, marketing manager for UHS, said the new building will be "a lot more efficient, a lot more private."

Ruskin said students can expect to see site excavation and foundation work within the coming weeks, with the erection of steel components to follow in January or February of next year.

The bottom floor of the building will feature an aboveground physical therapy gym in the southeast corner of the structure.

The second floor, or main floor, of the building will have a pharmacy, waiting rooms and a health promotion and education center.

While all of the services that will be offered at the new location are already available through the existing health services facility at Ritenour, the new building will attempt to improve and expand their capabilities.

The pharmacy, for example, will be set up in a drug store-style format, where students can take over-the-counter items off the shelves and pay for them. Currently, both prescription and over-the-counter items are located behind the counter at Ritenour, forcing students buying anything from condoms to antidepressants to wait in the same line.

"It seems like it'll be more convenient to move to that method," Jason Mc Lafferty (graduate-materials science) said of the new pharmacy.

The clinician offices and exam rooms will be located on the third and fourth floors of the building. The quantity of exam rooms will be increased, allowing students to wait in exam rooms to be helped, rather than sitting in the lobby.

In Ritenour, clinicians have one exam room apiece, which also doubles as their office, and they have to escort students back to be examined one at a time.

More open space will give more privacy for students. In the new facility, travel from room to room will leave less opportunity for exam patients to interact with each other.

"The waiting rooms [at Ritenour] are pretty crowded and pretty public, and we're not too happy about it," said Spear.

Another addition to the UHS experience will be the use of touch-screen computer kiosks for check-in. The use of this automated service will replace the current system where UHS employees record students' information upon entering.

This change will also be effective beginning next week in Ritenour, Spear said.

On the fifth floor of the new building, Counseling and Psychological Services will offer three group therapy rooms, as opposed to the one now available.

"We have a very progressive service here but the building doesn't look it," said Nagy. "You want the building to reflect what's inside."