City: Florence, SC

Category: Health Care

Telephone: (843) 777-2000

Address: 555 East Cheves St.

Description: About 75 miles from Myrtle Beach is McLeod Regional Hospital, a regional referral center for 12 counties in southeastern South Carolina. McLeod was established in 1906 as a small infirmary; today it’s a large high-tech medical center, with 331 beds and a variety of services. Many Horry County residents depend on McLeod’s neonatal intensive-care unit to tend to premature babies and full-term babies born with special problems.The hospital’s breast-imaging center helps doctors detect breast cancer in its early stages. McLeod had the state’s first permanent MRI system, a high-tech machine that uses a magnetic field to see into the body in a much clearer way than other scanning machines allow.McLeod also provides comprehensive inpatient, outpatient, and diagnostic facilities, including an extensive 24-hour laboratory, computerized tomography, angiography, computer-enhanced nuclear medicine, ultrasound, echocardiography, mammography, EEG, EKG, a vascular laboratory, osteoporosis screening, a sleep center, and 24-hour emergency care. The Florence hospital is the state-designated regional trauma center.The facility added a five-story freestanding Women’s Pavilion connected to McLeod. The pavilion houses a mammography unit, outpatient surgery rooms, and a special section for labor and delivery or Caesarean section.McLeod Children’s Hospital provides the highest level of pediatric care and technology available in the region. Nearly 100 of McLeod’s beds are dedicated to serving the needs of children. The Child Life Activity Center offers a place for relaxed play and distraction from illness or injury, and Child Life Specialists are assigned to work with children and their families to make the hospital stay easier. In 1994 McLeod opened the region’s only five-bed Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). In 1997 the PICU was upgraded to a six-bed unit and is under the direction of two board-certified pediatric specialists. McLeod has five pediatric subspecialists of pediatric cardiology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, and critical care.A range of support departments buttress the hospital’s services. These include rehabilitative services, pain management, cardiac rehabilitation, respiratory services, counseling and discharge planning, hospice, infection control, pastoral services, patient representatives, volunteer services, computer services, and marketing.