The University of Cincinnati Cancer Center celebrated the opening of the Blood Cancer Healing Center Monday, with several local media outlets highlighting the event.
The grand opening ceremony celebrated the beginning of clinical services in the facility, while additional spaces are scheduled to open throughout 2024 and into 2025-including research labs for new cancer treatment discoveries and wellness areas for food as medicine and mind and movement therapies. Community leaders, donors, medical professionals and patients came together to witness the official opening and celebrate a shared commitment to redefine the landscape of blood cancer care.
"We wanted to provide all the care to build a community like this under one roof. We have the attached parking garage, we have all the patient's items that you would need, like an on-site pharmacy, infusion suites, and patient care," Megan Johnstone, a University of Cincinnati Cancer Center clinical research director and program director for the Blood Cancer Healing Center, told WLWT.
Blood cancer presents a unique challenge, according to John Byrd, MD, because of its sheer variety.
"Although they represent approximately 10% to 20% of all cancers, in that 10% to 20%, there are probably 100 or more subtypes," Byrd, a University of Cincinnati Cancer Center physician-researcher and the Gordon and Helen Hughes Taylor Professor and Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, told the Cincinnati Enquirer.
The building was designed with patients' healing top of mind, and the all-in-one site offers efficiency, consolidation and convenience for patients.
"We have patients now that they might need a little extra care in the outpatient and in the infusion centers and in that case, sometimes they have to be sent to the ER to complete that treatment," Ed Faber, DO, Cancer Center physician researcher and associate professor in UC's College of Medicine, told WLWT. "Or patients may call in with symptoms that we can address very quickly and avoid ER visits. And now we don't quite have those capabilities. The 24-hour extended care unit here will allow us to provide that care for our patients."
