1960's: GHS Decades of Care

Over three Sundays, 163,000 Upstate residents were vaccinated for polio. It happened at Greenville Hospital System in the 1960s - In 1962, as Greenville General Hospital celebrated its 50th anniversary, polio was still a major public health issue. So much so, that in October of 1963 the community gathered for a massive undertaking - the "Let's wipe out polio forever" event ...administering the Sabine Polio vaccine for a donation of twenty five cents. Clinics were set up at 54 elementary schools and were busy from noon until 6pm. Over several Sundays...163,000 thousand out of Greenville County's 200,000 residents were vaccinated! The same year, citizens in the southernmost part of the county welcomed their own satellite hospital, the $500,000 dollar 35 bed Hillcrest Memorial Hospital in Simpsonville. Greenville General opened its first Intensive Care Unit, and added an Emergency Room that was three times larger than before. Even so, by the mid 1960s, the cry for expanding the hospital was well underway again. A report cited that General Hospital was "outmoded, non functional and undersized". No beds had been added since the 1950s and the Social Security Amendments Act of 1965 would soon come into play. Known as Medicare, it was estimated that at least 15,000 in Greenville Country alone would qualify for government funded medical care. This forced hospital officials to act quickly on expansion plans as already patients were at times housed in waiting areas and hallways. Just days before the new act went into effect in the Summer of 1966, the hospital board purchased the former Earle Dairy Farm on Grove Road and announced that it would continue to operate Greenville General Hospital while developing on the new 128 acre site - "the kind of buildings, facilities and services our rapidly growing area requires and deserves. " In April of 1967, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the guest speaker at the dedication of the first facility constructed on the new site...Marshall I. Pickens Hospital, the first stand alone psychiatric hospital in America.

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Education

Tags:

• 1960
• history
• centennial
• greenville hospital system