According to our next guest, our state faces a shortage of more than 5,300 nurses, with projections that show that gap growing to nearly 6,900 by 2035. Which is why his college is helping lead a new statewide effort to expand South Carolina’s nursing workforce. Mike Switzer interviews Liam Hein, an associate professor in the College of Nursing at the University of SC in Columbia. More details: https://www.sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2026/08/faculty-pipeline-strengthen-south-carolina-nursing-workforce.php
TRANSCRIPT
Switzer: Hello and welcome to another edition of the South Carolina Business Review. This is Mike Switzer. According to our next guest, our state faces a shortage of more than 5,300 nurses, with projections that show that gap growing to almost 7,000 by 2035. Which is why his college is helping lead a new statewide effort to expand South Carolina's nursing workforce. Liam Hein is an associate professor in the College of Nursing at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Liam, welcome to the program. Thank you. Tell us, in more detail now, what is this program that you guys are working on?
Hein: This project partners USC College of Nursing with MUSC Clemson, and with the support of the Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina foundation, we're trialing, a statewide nurse faculty pipeline program. And we are hiring faculty members at each of these college. And these faculty members are actually doctoral students during the last two years of their programs. So we're training them up on how to be faculty while they're still students.
Switzer: You've done some research, I guess. And the solution to this nursing shortage is we need more teachers.
Hein: That is one. This is obviously not going to be a single answer type thing for the problem. The situation is complex. It's interlinked with finances, retirements, aging populations, workplace contributions, all of that. In the south, though, we do have a 9% shortage of nursing faculty, and nearly half of them require earned doctorates, and those are fairly rare. The average age of a new professor is 50 years old in nursing. The experienced ones on average are 61 years old. So we need to train them younger to have them stay longer.
Switzer: So the doctoral students that are in this program now, who you are training to become professors, they signed up initially into this PhD program to become professors.
Hein: Some of them are in PhD, some of them are in the Doctor of Nursing practice programs. Some of them are research focused, and that is one track one can get into in academia. Others are practice focused. So they may be experienced nurse practitioners. And we need those to be able to teach our DNT nurse practitioners down the road too.
Switzer: So how difficult was it to collaborate with, all of the other competing universities in the state?
Hein: Well, the competing part wasn't the problem, because we're all on the same page and needing to expand our workforce. It's more of the bureaucracy. We're all three state institutions and with slightly different rules on how things were done. That was more of the challenge. We are up and running. We have nine very excited and satisfied fellows in the program right now, and we're having fun with this. I think this is going to be great.
Switzer: Are these students, these, soon to be professors, are they evenly divided across these universities?
Hein: Yes, there's three from each of these universities and they were hired through these universities to meet whatever they like. MUSC specific needs or Clemson specific needs for teaching. In what specialties those are, whatever the case may be.
Switzer: And so once they are in place as teachers and professors in these universities, then how long do we expect that their classrooms will fill up with the necessary nursing candidates?
Hein: That is part of that multimodal complexity situation. We need to, as well as developing more faculty, we also need to expand our potential clinical placements. Nurses need to have clinical experience, while their students to be taught, you know, not to be afraid the first time you're doing a procedure of X, Y or Z with a patient. So we train them in a clinical setting. One of our challenges that all three of our schools are facing is clinical placements, enough hospital beds and to have an, experienced nurse there to help guide these students as well. So we're working on many different facets, but this particular project is focused on the faculty themselves.
Switzer: Well, Liam, thank you so much for spending time with us today.
Heine: Thank you, Mike.
Switzer: Liam Hein is an associate professor in the College of Nursing at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. We will have a link to the program he spoke about posted at our webpage so you can learn more, SouthCarolinaPubliCRadio.org, where you can hear this show again, and you can hear us again wherever you find podcasts. With the South Carolina Business Review, this is Mike Switzer.
The views expressed on the South Carolina Business Review do not necessarily reflect those of South Carolina Public Radio. South Carolina Business Review transcripts are intended to accurately represent the original audio version of the program; however, some discrepancies or inaccuracies may exist. The audio format serves as the official record of South Carolina Business Review’s programming.
