Lexington Medical Center and the University of South Carolina broke ground in February on a new nursing building in West Columbia which will add state of the art equipment to the nursing program.
The estimated 52,000-square-foot nursing building is set to accommodate a 20,000 foot nursing simulation center, classroom space and more. The building is part of the institutions' partnership which also includes a graduate medical education building and new graduate education programs.
According to Jeanette Andrews, dean of the College of Nursing, the partnership will be beneficial in part due to the lack of space in the current College of Nursing.
“We are out of classroom space," Andrews said. "We are fortunate to have a lot of interest in nursing from others, we had almost 4000 applications for freshman last year. So, there's a high interest for nursing here, but we just were not able to grow."
Brent Powers, the senior vice president and chief medical officer at Lexington Medical Center, said that the new nursing facility will help increase the number of nurses graduating per year from 200 to 400.
"We're essentially doubling over the next five plus years the number of well-trained nurses that all of the healthcare systems and providers in the Midlands can benefit from," Powers said.
The new simulation space will be triple the size and provide an expanded area for nursing students to engage in hands-on learning. It will include an eight-bed hospital suite, a six-room primary care suite, a 36-bed skill suite and a community apartment.
"It's just a lot bigger, a lot more opportunity and state of the art for our students to train. This is impactful, not only because they're building the building, they're also going to provide faculty for clinical rotations over at Lexington, which is a big win win for both of us," Andrews said.
In addition to the new nursing building, the university will also work with Lexington Medical Center on the graduate medical education building that will be built adjacent to the nursing building and, starting in July, a family medicine residency and preliminary-year training program.
The preliminary-year training is completed by a variety of different physician specialties in preparation for other residency programs, and neither will be run by USC according to Dr. Les Hall, the dean of the School of Medicine.
"We won't be running the residency as they are being housed within Lexington Medical Center predominantly," Hall said, "what we're adding is our expertise as a university and helping to oversee education programs,".
Lexington Medical Center will fund the new educational facility as well as provide clinical instructors, while USC will fund equipment needed for the simulation center and furnishings for classroom spaces.
Powers said quoting a specific number for the initiative would not be 'appropriate' due to the variety of factors.
"It's a joint commitment from both of us, both operationally and financially. As you can imagine, there are direct costs like building, staff (and) preceptors, which are pretty obvious, but there's also numerous indirect costs," Powers said.
Construction on the building is planned to take about 15 months. The College of Nursing expects to move into the building by July 2024 and begin classes the following August.
Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified Brent Powers' title at Lexington Medical Center. The article has been updated to correctly reflect his position.