♪ opening music ♪ Payton Floyd> It was a great start with me being as young as I was.

I was 17 years old in high school my senior year, and I was able to get in a program that most people don't get until they're already out of high school in college.

♪ Maggie West> I stumbled across radiology and I loved it.

It kind of fell into my lap and I decided to do it.

♪ Emma Beach> The job is very rewarding.

I feel like I definitely make a difference sometimes.

I've had a lot of growth since I've started.

♪ Meira McKithen> Without health care, we wouldn't be saving people.

And I always hear more nurses, more nurses, not even just nurses.

It's the whole body of health care.

We need more people because without people, how can we help?

♪ Narrator> Hospitals are hiring, and not just doctors and nurses.

Every role counts.

And as you will see, there are plenty of in-demand jobs that require just a few semesters or less of technical training.

[silence] ♪ enlightening music ♪ Lindsay Edwards> Our program is a five semester program that's based on Greenwood campus.

We have 20 students that we take in every year.

We simultaneously have two cohorts at a time.

So, at any given point, we have 40 students in our program.

We rotate through several different clinical sites, and they start doing clinicals at five weeks, into the program.

So their very first semester, we send students into the clinical field and they are working on lab patients, they work in the lab simultaneously on our manikins.

So this is Maggie West.

She has completed three semesters of our program.

She has two left to complete before graduation.

And she is practicing hands on skills regularly here.

So, Maggie, what brought you into the field of radiology?

Why did you decide to do this?

Well, I thought I was going to do nursing for forever, and then when my brother became a nurse, I decided I don't want to do it anymore.

I still wanted to work in the hospital, and I did some research about, just some jobs in the hospital.

And I stumbled across radiology and I loved it.

It kind of fell into my lap and I decided to do it.

Lindsay Edwards> So, Maggie, could you demonstrate how you would do an abdominal X-ray for me today?

Maggie West> Yes, I can.

Just going to pull the tube over.

We make sure our distance is at 40.

♪ I'm going to line it up, make sure it's lined up with our bucky tray here.

♪ ♪ Lindsay Edwards> So, you have rotated through several different clinical sites, some being surgery in the E.R.

What is your favorite area to rotate through?

Maggie West> So my favorite place to rotate through is definitely the E.R.

I like the fast pacings of it, and I get to include my critical thinking skills, and it's just something new every day.

You don't know what's going to come through the door.

Lindsay Edwards> Would you recommend this program to prospective students in the in the high school platform?

Maggie West> Yeah, I would definitely recommend this program to people in high school.

I think it's a great opportunity for everyone, for males and females.

It's a great way to go into the hospital if anyone was interested.

The program can get hard at times, but it's definitely worth it in the end.

Lindsay Edwards> Radiology, for the past several years, we've had 100 percent job placement, once they graduate and pass their board exam.

The overall college has had a 96 percent job placement rate, as well, in the past year.

And we know that there are allied health jobs open and out there with them coming into our program, and we take students from all over.

They're not always competing for just a job in Greenwood.

They travel outside of the Greenwood County as well with these jobs that are open.

[sound of siren] My name is Madelyn Wood and I am a CT technologist here at Self Regional Healthcare.

A CT technologist is an imaging technologist.

We take internal pictures of patients bodies in a big donut machine and sometimes we give them contrast which highlights their blood vessels and helps us see the internal organs a lot better.

We see a lot of different patients.

We get patients from the E.R.

Some of our patients are outpatients.

We get patients from the I.C.U., the C.C.U.

just in patients.

So, our day to day work is we have a lot of patients.

[laughs] They're coming in.

I'm Andrea, and I'm a respiratory therapist.

We manage breathing treatments like albuterol, things like that for asthma, C.O.P.D.

We also help with life support, so, ventilation.

We can work with any age, babies up until the elderly.

So we rotate throughout the hospital.

Some of us work in the E.R.

Some of us work in the I.C.U.

the NICU, and then we have our basic floor patients.

In the E.R.

It's a little bit more hectic because you never know what's coming in.

You never know what you gonna get.

You might get a baby.

You might get a little teenager.

You might get somebody older.

And it depends.

Could be a car wreck, anything like that.

So that's our more chaotic work, which is my favorite.

We can rotate throughout the whole hospital.

So you don't get bored.

You get to see everything.

And you might do that in one week.

You might work everywhere in the whole hospital.

And that's what makes it fun.

So you learn something new every day.

I would say that I go home and feel pleased with what I've done.

It makes me feel good, and I want to come back and do it all over again.

So, yeah, I like it, so.

Lindsay Edwards> So students in high school really need to be thinking about where their life is going to go, what turn they're going to take.

Allied Health programs are a great way, to start your research.

There are so many different programs that we just offer at Piedmont Tech.

It's always a great opportunity to have a good degree and a great job placement with a good paying job.

When I talk to young people who are trying to plan a career, I encourage them to look at healthcare because there are so many different jobs in healthcare.

You have many career ladders.

If you start at one level, you can grow into the next, go into the next.

Get more education.

Get more training.

So that career development opportunity is one.

You can also go different directions with your jobs.

You can say, I want to start out as a, a dietitian in the hospital, but I really like patient care, so I'm going to become a nurse.

And the hospital often will train you to move into this other direction.

So, the variety of jobs, the upward mobility, the career progression, those are the things that make hospitals, really great places to work.

Some places, smaller employers, you may have one job you're trained for, but there aren't a lot of professional growth opportunities, and that's not the case in a hospital.

There are many other jobs you can always consider.

♪ soft inspirational music ♪ ♪ So the McLeod Health Apprenticeship Program is, a nursing assistant apprenticeship program that was developed back in 2017.

With our model, we have two components, a Youth Apprenticeship and a Traditional Apprenticeship Program with anyone over the age of 18.

With the Apprenticeship Program, we designed it to fill our skills gaps as well as our vacancies within our nursing assistance roles.

So with the Registered Apprenticeship, there are three main components, an Educational Component On-The-Job Training Component and Wage Progression Component.

When it comes to the Education Component of a Registered Apprenticeship, Florence-Darlington Technical College provides us the opportunity to send our students and future employees to the college to get the skills that they need to become certified nursing assistants.

Not only does McLeod Health work with Florence-Darlington Technical College, but we work with several other technical colleges who partner with Apprenticeship Carolina to develop and execute apprenticeship programs across all of our service areas.

Apprenticeship Carolina works very closely with these schools to ensure that all three components of the apprenticeship are met so that when our participants complete a program, they receive a nationally accredited certificate through the United States Department of Labor.

Now that certificate of completion will follow them for the rest of their life.

♪ Workforce development is necessary and workforce development is pipelining.

So where do we start our pipeline?

Well, we at McLeod Health start our pipeline with our high school students through various programs.

With the youth apprenticeship program model, it allowed us to pull in high school students who wanted the opportunity to see if health care is really where they want to be, if nursing is really what they want to do.

So if we have a high school student who is interested in becoming a nurse and they are accepted to the Youth Apprenticeship Program, it allows them to not only come out with gainful employment as a certified nursing assistant, but to, earn a livable wage at such a young age and explore those opportunities as working alongside a nurse.

To see if that's something that they really want to do, and to go to, spend their time and go to school and get that R.N., Registered Nurse license.

I think that we felt it was our duty to provide our, high school students with that opportunity to see if it's something that they really want to do, and how cool is it that you can make a livable wage at such a young age, and see if that's something that you really want to do?

♪ I did the McLeod Youth Apprenticeship Program, and with that, I had to be a high school student, I had to have a certain G.P.A.

and I had to have references.

So I'm a certified nursing assistant.

I'm like the right hand to a nurse.

I go in and I take vital signs such as blood pressure, heart rate, respirations.

And I also go in there; I do hourly checks on the patient.

I make sure they're as comfortable as possible.

I communicate with the parents, and I just keep the nurse updated throughout this entire process.

Well, when I was younger, my father been in the hospital multiple times, and I've always seen the nurses, the nursing assistants, and what they did.

It just fascinated me.

It's something that I just knew right there, I want to do that.

I want to try that out.

The Apprenticeship Program gave me the opportunity to get my Nurse A license at 16, which is really good, because some people, well, I know that they can't get theirs until they graduate high school, and that's 17.

Kelly Martinez> You get to see how other people do their work, and there's different things that's not in the book.

And, you just really get to see everything and how it's like in real life.

Meira McKithen> I would recommend this program to other high school students that want to be in the medical field, because it's a great way to have hands on experience, also, to see if this is really what you want to do in the future.

I mean, college isn't that far away and you wouldn't want to waste all your parent's money, so it would be nice to see.

Kelly Martinez> After I took this program, I knew that this is what I wanted to do, but I wanted to take another step and become a nurse.

So I'm planning to do that, and I'm planning to still work with McLeod.

♪ Payton Floyd> It was a great start with me being as young as I was.

I was 17 years old in high school my senior year, and I was able to get in a program that most people don't get until they're already out of high school in college.

I was able to get ahead in all of my career goals.

My director has had meetings with me, to where I am pretty much guaranteed a job already as a registered nurse.

They're also all willing, on my floor and everywhere else I've been at McLeod, all willing to support me to get where I'm going.

Ingrid Cherry> So with our Traditional or Adult Apprenticeship, it appeases to our, current workers who may have just come to McLeod Health, get their foot in the door.

They know that they wanted to work in healthcare.

But then they started exploring other opportunities and came across our apprenticeship program to see that they could move up into, a certified nursing assistant role.

So, it provides them the opportunity to explore new career, to provide their contribution to health care, as well as make a livable wage.

♪ So actually, I worked here already as a transporter.

My friend who actually had went through the program already had told me about it.

So I decided.

He told me how to apply.

So I went on McLeod website and applied for that apprenticeship program.

I did classes at Florence-Darlington Tech on the campus.

And then we did about half the semester, it was like a whole semester long.

So, I half the semester you did, just textbooks and after that you went into the clinicals, which was more hands on, which was a lot more, a lot more experience.

We get blood sugars, temps, respirations, the heart rate.

We get blood sugars on patients.

We also get labs, which is fine.

I've never thought I would ever do that in my lifetime, but I've got a lot of experience with that.

And since I'm now a certified nursing assistant, I do want to become either a nurse and after that, or to be like a, nurse practitioner or physician's assistant.

People that don't know about nursing, I really do recommend the program to them just because it's very, you get experience a lot like what you're going to be going into as a nurse, too.

Meira McKithen> Healthcare is so important because, you know, we need people.

Without healthcare, we wouldn't be saving people.

And I always hear more nurses, more nurses and we honestly do we need more nurses because without, not even just nurses, it's the whole body of healthcare.

We need more people because without people, how can we help?

♪ gentle music ♪ ♪ Hospitals are like little cities.

There are so many different jobs to make a hospital work.

All of us grew up thinking if we wanted to work in healthcare, we would be a doctor or a nurse.

That is not the majority of people who work in healthcare.

There are so many jobs, and we typically don't know about those jobs until later in life, if at all.

So we want to make sure people understand you don't have to be a doctor to make a difference or a nurse.

You can be a plumber, you can be an electrician, you can be a computer scientist, you can be a dietitian, you can be somebody in environmental Services.

You can be a surgical tech and help with the surgery, but not have to do all the training.

So there are many, many jobs in healthcare, not just being a doctor, a nurse.

Those are important, but they're certainly not the only ones.

♪ Tidelands is growing.

We are the biggest employer in Georgetown County, but we're getting really ready to expand even further north and a little bit to the west.

We've got plans to build a new hospital.

We've got plans to just grow all over the place.

We expect our growth to potentially double in size over the next 5 to 10 years, and that's to meet the needs of the community.

So there's so many people that are moving into the area, so many needs in the community, so many things that we try to fill in those gaps and take care of all those people.

And so, that's our main mission.

We are recruiting in a couple of different areas.

The one area is within students.

So we're really focused on our student program.

We are finding that through our really robust program that we've put together in the last few years, about 30 percent of our openings that we fill annually come from that student program.

♪ Horry Georgetown Technical College is a huge partner, and we've been involved with them for years and years, and they just continue to get creative with us as we see needs.

We talked to them.

We've been really involved with this new concept called P2P, which is Pathways 2 Possibilities, and that is a focus on every eighth grader in the several county radius.

And the reason it's eighth graders is there's been a lot of studies that say eighth grade is when kids start to think about their careers.

And so there's pathways and all the systems come together.

We're not recruiting as Tidelands South.

We're coming together as health systems and in explaining to these students, if you want to be an accountant, you can do that in the health system.

If you want to be, a mechanic, if you want to be a nurse, if you want to draw blood, there's a lot of different opportunities.

And so that is getting a lot of eighth graders now thinking about, oh, health science may be the way that I want to go.

There's jobs available in the area.

I mean, we have openings just about in every job that you could imagine.

But I would say the tech, anything with tech, tied to it is big.

We need to find people that have the cybersecurity skillset.

We need to find people that have the ability to just help us with our hardware needs.

I mean, there's so many needs within the I.T.

space.

My role here is a network administrator.

I work with all kinds of network equipment like routers, switches, access points, all this stuff that gets everybody connected in the hospitals and even in your home when you have that stuff.

I haven't always been interested in tech and I.T.

I didn't really know what I wanted to do after I got to high school.

I went to a bunch of different colleges to, like, look around and see what there was.

And then I stumbled upon, H.G.T.C, Horry Georgetown Technical College.

And they had lots of good programs, mainly networking, and then they came out with the cybersecurity, associate's degree.

So, I went and got both of those degrees.

I didn't really know where to go.

I was looking around for all kinds of jobs.

One of my professors reached out to me about an opportunity here at Tidelands.

And so, I sent my resume in and I had an interview and here I am.

All the equipment that I work with will, like the workstations, they'll, they'll connect to the switches, and that's how they get internet access.

So in my role, a lot of the, medical devices will have to connect to the network, and they have to be able to send data to where it needs to go.

So the nurse goes in to see the patient, and they, take some readings off of them, and then they have to send that data.

that's going over the network.

So, we're helping to facilitate that connection.

If the network went down, it would be, it would be a huge impact.

It would affect patient care and also be a loss of revenue.

So, we want to maintain like a 99.999 percent uptime year round.

♪ enlightening music ♪ ♪ Jeremy Stephens> We have done a lot of studies and a lot of research that indicates that the newer generations entering the workforce really look to be promoted from a title perspective pretty quick.

It's constantly about taking that workforce.

Once we get them on board, we can't lose them.

We got to retain them and retention, one of the big focuses is on that development and feeling like they have the opportunity to move and take on more and expand.

James Kochie> I think the doctors and nursing staff, they realize that the I.T.

staff is really important or else they wouldn't be able to do what they're doing now.

And so, it definitely makes me feel important, and especially all my co-workers, I'm sure they feel the same way.

Because without the doctors and nurses, we wouldn't have a hospital without the I.T.

staff, we wouldn't have a hospital either.

So, I think we're all pretty equally important around here.

Jeremy Stephens> It's a chance to give back to the community.

It is a inherent opportunity to take care of somebody.

It is looking at your neighbors and knowing if something happens, they're going to be okay.

You don't get that in other industries.

I mean, you might make balance sheets, balance, you might build a car.

Those are all really awesome things.

But, in healthcare, you're talking about people's lives and you're talking about families, lives and that's the key.

To me, I think that's the biggest thing that is the compelling argument for kids and really anybody to come into healthcare is that you're going to really make a difference and you're going to be paid well.

There's going to be jobs.

It's a lot of job security and healthcare.

We're always going to need healthcare, but it's a chance to just take care of somebody.

And, I mean, that's what it's all about.

♪ soft music ♪ ♪ ♪ The PATH Program at Beaufort Memorial is one of our greatest investments in Beaufort Memorial employees.

So PATH means People Achieving Their Highest.

My high school is all the way in in Colleton, and I think they have a C.N.A.

program, but I was never, I didn't know that I wanted to be in healthcare.

Then, I heard about the PATH Program.

I was patient care aide, so I had no experience, no nothing, no schooling for healthcare.

And then I walked in straight off the street.

Nursing, I definitely feel like I want to do that down the line, and I think PATH Program financially, that'll help me a lot going through there.

I feel like I, like am very confident in my job and my skills because I've been doing it for a little bit.

The job is very rewarding.

I feel like I definitely make a difference sometimes.

I've had a lot of growth since I started.

♪ Joy Solomon> This new simulation center that we have at B.M.H.

is really a dream come true and it's a huge, investment of the organization.

It gives us the opportunity to create any clinical scenario that you could think of.

And we can program our manikins to display those clinical situations, and then they can train.

So if there's any errors, they get the opportunity to perfect that, in a simulated environment versus in a live setting.

Emma Beach> Can I get your vitals?

manikin> Sure.

Go ahead.

Joy Solomon> So it's very unique because, it speaks to all areas in the hospital.

From critical care on our highest fidelity manikin It can be ventilator.

We can, hook it up to our ventilator.

You can take blood sugars on it with our machines and get a blood sugar reading.

Emma Beach> Are you doing okay today?

manikin> I'm having the worst headache of my life.

Joy Solomon> It breathes, it bleeds, it cries.

You can simulate a stroke or a heart attack.

We have our O.B.

area where you can, our manikin can give birth to a baby and simulate, maternal crisis that our staff would need to know how to manage What it means for South Carolina is that B.M.H.

was willing to make that type of investment.

I mean, this is an outstanding, it's an amazing investment.

It's not something that you see every day.

It's very unique for a hospital to make that type of investment is very unique.

You'll see it in an academic setting exclusively, but for a hospital healthcare facility to make that type of investment in learning and education and training really speaks to what B.M.H.

is willing to do, not just for the employees at B.M.H., but, it speaks to their commitment to excellence and what they want to do for the patients that we serve in our community.

♪ One of the great things about hospitals as employers is that they are not going away.

This is not a transient kind of job.

The hospital will be there in the community.

So, if you work there, there will be a job there for you in the future.

And then in a growth state like South Carolina, we're not seeing fewer people to care, but we're seeing more.

So there're going to be more and more jobs to keep up with the growing population.

In addition to that, healthcare always evolves.

We're always advancing medicine.

We want better technologies, we want better pharmaceuticals.

And so there is always something new to learn or new area to grow into new, technologies that need to be mastered.

So there are new jobs coming on all the time to help support healthcare.

South Carolina's hospitals are acutely aware that many people think healthcare is doctors and nurses.

They want to be sure that up and coming students who are trying to choose a career path know how many jobs there are in hospitals and healthcare.

If more people understood the the great wages, the career mobility, the challenging, rewarding work, we believe more people would select healthcare as a profession.

They have to know about it.

If they never hear about these jobs, we can't expect them to select.

♪ closing music ♪ ♪ ♪