Lexington Medical Center has announced a partnership with the University of South Carolina. The two are forming the union to combat a nursing nursing shortage and to increase the number of primary care physicians.

Lexington Medical Center will build a 50,000-square-foot state-of-the-art nursing simulation center and teaching space on the hospital’s campus to provide clinical training for USC’s growing nursing student population. This new space is off of Sunset Boulevard. It will allow USC to increase its number of nursing graduates by 80% annually.  

A new graduate medical education (GME) facility at  LMC will help meet local and statewide needs for primary care physicians, a goal that aligns with USC School of Medicine Columbia’s mission to increase the number of primary care physicians in the state. The hospital’s first GME program will be in family medicine and will accept 13 residents per year beginning in summer 2023. Construction began this year on a 45,000-square-foot building to house Lexington Medical Center’s graduation medical education programs’ instructional space and patient care clinics. 

In May, Roger Sipe, LMC’s senior VP of operations announced – at a C-WC Chamber Breakfast – plans for a $51.5 million building, including a three-story $18.9 million Graduate Medical Education Building across from the main campus in West Columbia, near the property where a former Bojangles restaurant was located. Click here to read that story

The hospital’s first GME program will be in family medicine and accept 13 residents per year beginning next summer.

In May, Sipe also announced that Lexington Medical Center has purchased 1.77 acres at 1111 Knox-Abbott Drive in Cayce and plans to build an urgent care facility on the property.

Sipe said in May, Lexington Health Properties Inc. currently owns 66 buildings and 4.2 million sq.-ft. in facilities. That includes LMC’s 1.6 million sq-ft. main campus on Sunset Boulevard in West Columbia. LMC recently opened a 224,000 sq.-ft. community medical facility in Richland Northeast and there is a 113,000 sq.-ft. community medical facility in Lexington.