‘Safe care, the first day’: The new Fort Mill hospital readies for its first patients
The long wait for a new Fort Mill hospital has all but come to an end.
The new Piedmont Medical Center campus will see its first patients Sept. 7. The hospital will start with a small number of cases and scheduled admissions. Yet all parts and programs for the new facility will be ready.
“Everything will be open on day one as scheduled,” said Mark Nosacka, market CEO of the hospital group that also includes Piedmont Medical Center in Rock Hill.
The new hospital will have an emergency department, operating rooms, medical and recovery beds, delivery rooms for maternity patients, and intensive care space. The 100-bed facility on 40 acres is at 1000 Wellness Way, on the northwest corner of S.C. 160 and U.S. 21 Bypass.
The addition is significant for Fort Mill, and for York County. New hospital openings aren’t common. The Rock Hill facility dates back 40 years, as of next year.
“It’s new for me personally,” Nosacka said of opening a new hospital. “I’ve been peripherally involved or connected before, but this is the first time I’ve been directly involved with a new hospital opening.”
A new hospital wasn’t supposed to take this long.
Legal challenges to several state decisions on which hospital group would get to build the new Fort Mill facility lasted more than a decade. A final state supreme court decision in 2019 favored Piedmont.
The hospital group submitted plans to the town for a 200,000-square-foot facility. A separate medical office building also is part of the site.
In the three years since it became clear Piedmont wild be there, Nosacka said his group both has solicited and received plenty of feedback in Fort Mill.
“The feedback is, everyone is looking forward to having a trustworthy, safe and dependable hospital in this community,” Nosacka said.
Because of the timing of Piedmont’s final approval, hospital construction took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among many healthcare challenges and changes, the pandemic meant employers across an array of industries have had harder times finding workers.
Numerous hiring events were held for the Fort Mill hospital. When complete, the hospital will hire about 600 employees.
“We are still in the staffing shortages that are related to COVID, but the workers have signed up to work in Fort Mill at numbers greater than we anticipated,” Nosacka said. “There’s a lot of people who were attracted to this because it is a new hospital, and it’s in their community.”
A hospital isn’t a bakery, where owners might want people lined out the door to get in on opening day. It isn’t a restaurant, where diners might give staff a couple of weeks after opening to iron out kinks.
“We don’t have any luxury of not giving everybody safe care, the first day,” Nosacka said.
Because Piedmont already has a hospital in Rock Hill, employees for the new Fort Mill site have been trained. Drills, simulations and plans were run. The hospital even has a command center it will activate for the opening to address whatever unforeseen issue could arise.
“Immediately we’ll have a team of people devoted to solving it,” Nosacka said.
After the opening, Nosacka said, Fort Mill will have a normal, operating hospital. Staff will get input to see what demands the community will place on it.
Fort Mill is a high-growth community with more than double the population it had when Piedmont first applied in 2005 to build the hospital. Tega Cay, unincorporated Fort Mill, Indian Land and other areas the new hospital could serve also have grown at high rates.
The 80,000-square-foot medical office building on the same campus as the hospital will be partially occupied when the hospital opens. It will serve many of the same doctors who utilize the hospital. Clinical services will grow at the medical building, and at the hospital itself, after the Sept. 7 opening.
After years waiting, Nosacka sees a new hospital now that is ready to grow with its community.
“This is a community hospital that’s devoted to the Fort Mill community,” Nosacka said.
This story was originally published August 29, 2022 at 1:52 PM with the headline "‘Safe care, the first day’: The new Fort Mill hospital readies for its first patients."
