Copyright Charleston Post and Courier
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. The Bon Secours unit will be staffed by MUSC pediatricians with Roper nursing staff cross-trained with MUSC, as well as a pediatric pharmacist. The informal transfer process between the two was happening pretty often, Baker said, as Roper was sending about 700 kids a year on to Shawn Jenkins. At times, the children’s hospital was full and those kids had to wait in Roper ERs for a bed to open, she said. Some of that is seasonal, as fall and winter respiratory season can often result in serious illness in children who need to go to a hospital. But they may not need the higher level of complex care provided at Shawn Jenkins, Baker said. “This is really the puzzle piece that we felt we could play in the overall statewide service and in local community service,” she said. That in turn frees up Shawn Jenkins to focus on those higher-need patients, Scheurer said. “We want to make sure that two things are accomplished: that patients get the care that they need, when they need it, where they need it, closest to home; and that we continue to evolve the capacity of this really specialized Children's Hospital to care for an increasingly complex population that requires more intensive sets of services,” he said. With the new arrangement, should a child at the Bon Secours unit suddenly need that higher level of expertise, it makes that process easier and smoother, Baker said. As the state population continues to grow rapidly, the number of children is growing as well and their need for care, and specialized care, is increasing, Scheurer said. This partnership helps strengthen those resources for the whole state, he said. “We want to make sure that South Carolina kids have access to the kind of therapies that they can get anywhere in the country, but right here at home,” Scheurer said.
