IF YOU GO

The groundbreaking for the new Duke Medicine Cancer Center takes place today at the facility’s construction site on Trent Drive, between the School of Nursing and Duke Hospital South. The program will begin at 11:30 a.m.

Gov. Beverly Perdue, along with Duke University President Richard Brodhead and Victor Dzau, CEO of Duke University Health System, will speak at the ceremony.

By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM — A little more than a year ago, Ley Mitchell was diagnosed with breast cancer.

She’s had a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery. She’s been back and forth to the Duke University Health System oncology department. She’s been all over the medical center campus for treatment.

“When you’re feeling sick and you’re scared, when you’re very tired and weak, driving around the whole hospital area, even up to the doctors’ offices on Roxboro Road, is not something you want to do,” Mitchell said. “It’s confusing and tiring.”

Mitchell — who otherwise raved about her experiences at Duke — recalled at least one time showing up at one office while her doctor was at another one.

“When you have seven appointments a week, all that traveling around, all that walking from parking lots, it’s just exhausting,” she said.

In three years or so, cancer patients at Duke won’t have to scramble nearly that much.

Officials today will break ground for the new Duke Medicine Cancer Center, part of a $700 million project that includes a new Duke Medicine Pavillion for surgery and critical care. The cancer center will combine the services offered to cancer patients that are currently scattered across campus into one seven-story building with 267,000 square feet of additional space featuring terraces, a cafe and an outdoor rooftop garden where patients can have their chemotherapy sessions.

Bringing all the cancer services together, under one roof, is the major driving force for the new facility.

“In order to provide our patients with the ideal experience, we simply need to have our physicians from many different disciplines available at one site,” said H. Kim Lyerly, the director of the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center. “When we’re not in the same place, we don’t have a chance to talk with each other. Sometimes we have to walk to another building to talk.”

And with treating more than 7,000 new patients a year, space currently is at a premium.

“We’re busting at the seams now,” Lyerly acknowledged, and Mitchell recalled waiting rooms that are sometimes so crowded, “you feel vulnerable, and its dangerous, kind of scary.”

It all means that the treatment experience for patients, Lyerly admits, can be less than ideal.

And without a new facility, that situation is likely to get worse.

Population growth in the region, combined with the aging of the population, means more patients in the future. Some projections indicate double-digit growth annually in cancer patients.

Duke has been talking about a new, dedicated cancer facility for nearly three decades. “It may not seem to be the best of economic times to do this now,” Lyerly acknowledged, “but knowing the lead time and the things that can delay construction, we need to finally move on this. It’s long overdue.”

The new facility will be patient-focused, officials promised. “It will be a healing environment,” Lyerly said. “The atmosphere will be serene. The staff will be supported so they can provide the type of care that you would find very comforting.”

The groundbreaking comes on the heels of the opening earlier this fall of a similar facility, the N.C. Cancer Hospital, on the UNC medical campus in Chapel Hill.

“We are already one of the nexuses of cancer care of the country,” Lyerly said. “These two new facilities will make us even more so, strengthening the research profile and the economic vitality of the region.”

Mitchell, who is now cancer-free, still goes to Duke regularly for checkups, and will need to in the future. She’s looking forward to going to the new facility, which is scheduled to open in 2012.

“It is a terrifying time. when you’re in the hospital so much, in so many institutional settings,” she said. “Any time you can go somewhere not so institutional, that makes you feel stronger.”