After years of informally collaborating on the care of sick children, two of the Lowcountry’s largest health care providers are forming a new pediatric unit inside a hospital in West Ashley to meet a growing need for care.
Roper St. Francis Healthcare System and Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital at Medical University of South Carolina are teaming up to create the new 10,000-square-foot, 16-bed unit at Bon Secours St. Francis Hospital in West Ashley.
It is the first formal collaboration on pediatric care between two health care entities that have nearly 400 years of history between them.
The unit should be open by the end of the year, said Dr. Megan Baker, chief operating officer for Roper St. Francis.
The effort started about two years ago when Roper St. Francis noticed it had a growing number of sick children who needed hospital care that Roper was not equipped to provide — kids that were then transferred to Shawn Jenkins, Baker said.
As it began to consider this growing need, Roper recognized that pediatric “is not something that we’ve done in an inpatient setting for many years. And so rather than reinventing the wheel, with such talented and nationally recognized partners just literally five miles away, it made sense to partner,” she said.
That also coincided with an evolving sense of the mission at Shawn Jenkins, said Dr. Mark Scheurer, chief of Children’s and Women’s Services at MUSC Health.
“We realize that the future of the care that we deliver at Shawn Jenkins needs to be outside of its walls, and we need to meet patients where they are, and we need to create access for high quality pediatric care with partners in our communities,” he said.
In fact, it was a great fit from the beginning, Scheurer said.
“When Megan called, it really got me excited, because it was as if she knew what I was already thinking and what we had kind of been talking about internally,” about extending services into the community, he said.