Saint Francis officials tour site of heart, cancer center

Rep. Jo Ann Emerson joined Saint Francis Medical Center administrators and board members Thursday on the first tour of its Heart Hospital and Cancer Institute under construction.

The four-story, $84 million facility will open in July on schedule and on budget, said Saint Francis Medical Center president and CEO Steven Bjelich. About 70 new jobs will be added to the staff because of the expansion.

Currently Saint Francis' outpatient cancer treatment facilities are scattered between its Cancer Institute in Doctors' Park and the Cape Medical Oncology practice on the west side of the Saint Francis campus. When the new facility opens, Cape Medical Oncology will move to the fourth floor, where a new oncology infusion center will have 30 chemotherapy treatment rooms.

Radiation services will moved to the first floor of building.

The building contractor, Kiefner Brothers Inc., poured 85 truckloads of concrete for the three vaults in the new radiation oncology area to absorb the radiation released by the equipment. The rooms have 8-foot-thick walls and will house two linear accelerators and a CyberKnife.

The CyberKnife, a robotic radiosurgery system at Saint Francis will be the fourth CyberKnife in Missouri, Bjelich said. The CyberKnife is an alternative to traditional surgery in the treatment of tumors. It uses beams of radiation to destroy cancerous cells, Bjelich said. There are only about 100 such systems in the United States.

The cancer and heart services areas will have separate entrances.

The heart-related services will be on the second floor of the facility and will include 10 cardiac intensive care rooms that are desperately needed, Bjelich said.

"Our ICU beds are generally full. As a regional center, we're getting patients from all over. We're serving parts of five states," he said. In addition to Missouri, the hospital draws patients from Kentucky, Illinois, Arkansas and Tennessee, he said.

Also in the Heart Institute portion of the building will be a large waiting area and three cardiac catheterization labs where doctors will diagnose heart patients and an electrodiagnostic lab where heart stress tests will be conducted.

The new pharmacy area on the first floor will triple the size of the hospital's existing pharmacy and feature a robot that picks up and delivers medications. Cape Diabetes and Endrocrinology also will move its offices from Doctors' Park to the first floor of the new building.

A total of 50 private inpatient rooms and a rooftop garden will make up the third floor.

mmiller@semissourian.com

388-3646

Pertinent address:

211 Saint Francis Drive, Cape Girardeau, MO