WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Three new veterinary hospitals on Purdue University’s campus will bring much needed space for treatment and teaching when they open next spring, according to the director of the university’s Veterinary Hospital.

The new hospitals for small animals, equine and farm animals will be east of Lynn Hall, home of the College of Veterinary Medicine. The cost of the project is $108 million, with $73 million appropriated by the Indiana legislature and $35 million committed by Purdue.

“The current hospital is very small and very outdated,” explained Dr. Ellen I. Lowery, who has served as director since February 2020. “We essentially ran out of room. We’ve expanded our specialty services for animals quite a bit here at Purdue but there hasn’t been any space to expand those services within the current hospital.

“Our emergency hospital, for example, which is the only emergency hospital within a 60-mile radius of this community, essentially works out of one room,” she noted. “The new complex will have a separate entrance so we can keep emergency patients separate from scheduled appointments. We’ll have a separate entrance for patients that might carry an infectious disease, so what we’ll call our isolations. They’ll come in a separate entrance to keep our community pets and animals safe from emergency or infected animals as well.”

The new facilities will increase the number of operating rooms and expand the amount of teaching space and anesthetic capabilities, Lowery said. With the separate hospitals for equine and farm animals, horses can be kept separate from cows, goats and sheep, she stated.

“From a biosecurity perspective, that really helps out with that,” Lowery pointed out. “Not only do we get a better hospital facility with innovative space, increased space, better teaching for the students, we’ll also be able to see more cases in the hospital, which is important because our caseload here has risen quite a bit. We want it to be a great experience from the perspective of animals getting the best care they possibly can as well as clients getting the best care they possibly can. To do that, we need an updated facility.”

The small animal hospital – which includes an expanded emergency area – will add 65,000 square feet to the existing small animal hospital facilities in Lynn Hall, currently about 40,000 square feet, according to the College of Veterinary Medicine. The equine hospital will be 73,000 square feet and the farm animal hospital, 24,000 square feet.

The facilities will be referred to as the David and Bonnie Brunner Purdue Veterinary Medical Hospital Complex. The three new hospitals in the complex will also be named after the Brunners.

David Brunner is a veterinarian in central Indiana and received a doctor of veterinary medicine degree from Purdue in 1979. The Brunners have made a $10 million leadership commitment to the university.

Site preparation began in 2020 and construction continued through the pandemic. The small animal hospital will open in the spring, Lowery said. The equine and farm animal hospitals will open a little later.

Formal classroom instruction will continue to be conducted in Lynn Hall, but students will have learning opportunities in the new facilities, she noted. “There will be rounds rooms for students, there will be some learning spaces. We’re working to make it what we call a smart hospital so that students can observe things on screens and those types of things. They can visualize what the surgeons are doing, for example.”

The university will be hiring credentialed technicians in every area of the hospital, she said.

Lowery said she hopes the new facilities will help with the current shortage of veterinarians in many areas of the region and the country.

“The profession is really working right now to address the potential shortage (of veterinarians),” she explained. “The hope is we’ll be able to accommodate more students and we can, I guess, build that pipeline for the profession so we can add more to the profession.”

More veterinarians are needed in part because the level of care given to small pets and companion animals by their owners has significantly changed, Lowery said.

“If you look at a decade, a couple of decades ago, even companion animals were often backyard pets and farm pets or those types of pets. Now, they’ve kind of gone from the backyard to the house to the sleep-in-the-bed dog. So they’re a part of the family. The human-animal bond is so strong, it’s so beneficial to us as a society. I think people are just investing more in their family members.”