By Rachel Pleasant
Staff Writer

East Cooper Regional Medical Center may be planning a new, larger facility, Roper St. Francis Healthcare may have a new hospital in the works and the Medical University of South Carolina may be expanding but, overall, none are too worried about staffing the new facilities.

Roper St. Francis, which is in the preliminary phases to build an 85-bed, 250,000-square-foot hospital at the intersection of Highway 17 North and Faison Road, has a simple solution for staffing—transfer employees from the health care system’s downtown facility. The new hospital is expected to employ about 300 people.

“We have a lot of people who live in Mount Pleasant who would like to work there as well,” said Roper St. Francis spokeswoman Margaret Mullins.

At East Cooper Regional Medical Center, which is planning a larger facility on a site adjacent to its current building at 1200 Johnnie Dodds Blvd., the number of employees is expected to increase, but Shannon Iriel, human resources director, said the need to hire more employees won’t be felt in a single blow.

“There won’t be a huge impact all at once,” Iriel said. “The growth will be gradual.”

The employee roster at ECRMC is currently at 660 and will likely grow to about 700, or more, over time, Iriel said, but the hospital will pull from a special pool of workers to get through the transition.

“We have a resource pool of workers who don’t have set schedules,” Iriel said. “Some of them work two or three times a month.”

Despite a widely publicized shortage of nurses—a shortage that the American Association of Colleges of Nursing expects to grow as baby boomers age—Iriel said ECRMC has been lucky in avoiding huge staffing deficits.

“Our vacancy rate has been under 2 percent to 3 percent for the past year,” Iriel said. “We’ve been very lucky because we have no difficulties in recruiting for any particular position.”

ECRMC benefits from having so many resources for nurses nearby, including the Medical University of South Carolina, Trident Technical College and Charleston Southern University, Iriel said.

Additionally, ECRMC is owned by Tenet Healthcare Corp., so its job openings are advertised in Tenet facilities across the country.

The most troublesome positions to fill are in the pharmacy department simply because they take the longest to find qualified people, Iriel said.

“Pharmacy has become very, very competitive,” she said. “There’s a program at MUSC, but it graduates only a few people each year. It’s become very competitive because of retail. If you work at a retail location, you have a Monday through Friday schedule with set hours, and that’s very different from a hospital.”

Staffing problems are eased by the relative lack of competition among hospitals for employees, Iriel said.

Through the South Carolina Hospital Association, hospitals receive reports on the current salaries for various positions at other facilities in the area and set wages accordingly, creating little monetary reason for a nurse to choose one hospital over another, Iriel said.

At MUSC, Marilyn Schaffner, administrator for clinical services and chief nursing officer, said it’s unclear just how many employees will need to be hired to staff the 156-bed expansion but she is concerned about finding the necessary laboratory technicians, which she said is one of the most difficult positions to fill.

Also on Schaffner’s mind, is making MUSC an employer of choice for nurses – and keeping the nurses the hospital recruits. MUSC has programs in the works to address both issues, she said.

Rachel Pleasant is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at rpleasant@charlestonbusiness.com.

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