MOVING THE MEDICAL CENTER

BY THIS TIME NEXT YEAR THERE won't be many doctors strolling around Occom Pond with stethoscopes dangling from their pockets. If all goes according to plan, the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center will have moved to the next town, into a new $218 million complex in Lebanon. The relocation was needed because the present site was inadequate for the kind of future envisioned by medical planners. In- deed, the normally understated

Planning Steering Committee report boasts, "When completed, this new facility will provide a state-ofthe-art academic medical center with the most modern teaching, research, and patient-care facilities in the country."

An integral part of the move was the purchase of the existing complex by the College. The purchase offers

Dartmouth the opportunity to ease a critical shortage of office and classroom space. But don't expect many facility and administrators to relocate soon. The planning report recommends razing the hospital's eightstory main building and starting anew. The cost of renovating the sixties-vintage building is the same as that of new construction. The fate of the other buildings in the old complex will be decided later.

The center's move into a $218 millioncomplex will open up space on campus.