Cancer Care Northwest, of Spokane, has added doctors to its North Side clinic and has begun offering additional services there, along with completing a remodeling of the facility and purchasing new equipment, says Jean Galovin, the clinic manager.

"We're now able to offer a full set of services a cancer patient will need during the course of their treatment," says Galovin. She says the efforts will deter patient travel to other Spokane-area clinics to receive services that previously weren't available at the clinic.

By the end of this month at the clinic, Cancer Care Northwest will have installed a new 16-slice computed tomography (CT) scanner, which will deliver 3-D images of areas of the body doctors want to treat, he says. The CT scanner, which costs $350,000, is manufactured by General Electric Co.

Last November, Cancer Care Northwest spent $2 million on a new linear accelerator for the North Side clinic, and another $300,000 on the remodeling project there.

The clinic, located at 605 E. Holland in the Northpointe Office Building, now has 38 employees, up from 30 in 2008, Galovin says. The clinic occupies 12,500 square feet of leased space, and serves patients in north Spokane, along with patients from several communities to the north, including Kettle Falls, Colville, Newport, Chewelah, Inchelium, Hunters, and Colbert, Wash., Galovin says. It opened in June 2000.

The clinic now has four doctors on staff, up from two doctors last year at this time, Galovin says.

In addition to the two medical oncologists the clinic had earlier, it has added a surgical oncologist and a radiation oncologist. A nurse practitioner also is on staff there, and Cancer Care Northwest plans to hire a third medical oncologist for the clinic, says Galovin. A medical oncologist treats cancer with medicine, including chemotherapy; a surgical oncologist is responsible for the surgical aspects of cancer-related procedures such as biopsies; and radiation oncologists treat cancer with radiation.

The new radiation oncologist, Dr. Robert Fairbanks, joined the office in March, and Dr. Byron Wright, the new surgical oncologist, started there in August, Galovin says.

It has been six years since that clinic has had a radiation department, says Brian Pence, director of radiation and imaging services for Cancer Care Northwest. It stopped offering radiation oncology there and moved radiation equipment to another office because the service wasn't sustainable there at the time, as patient volume was lower than expected.

The remodeling project at the North Side clinic was started in February and was completed in July. Vandervert Construction Inc., of Spokane, was the general contractor, Galovin says. The dcor was changed to include natural colors.

"We're trying to bring in a sense of healing, and soothing," Galovin says.

Treatments are more accurate if patients are comfortable, as that helps with patients' breathing, Pence says.

The linear accelerator, manufactured by Palo Alto, Calif.-based Varian Medical Systems Inc., delivers doses of radiation to cancer lesions or tumors as prescribed by a radiation oncologist, says Pence. The patient lies still on a table as the machine delivers radiation doses from different angles. It treats the lesions or tumors while avoiding critical areas nearby, he says. The machine also takes X-rays to help caregivers target cancerous areas, Pence says. The linear accelerator has been treating about 15 patients a day.

Separately, Cancer Care Northwest has spent more than $80,000 to launch the first phase of a new Web site, www.cancercarenorthwest.com.

The site is designed for both patients and referral providers. It has more than 80 pages of information about 22 different types of cancer, treatment and technology, health and nutrition information, clinic-specific information, new-patient documents, and checklists for referral providers to ease the process of referring a patient to Cancer Care Northwest.

Cancer Care Northwest also has offices on Spokane's South Side, at 601 S. Sherman; downtown at 910 W. Fifth, in Deaconess Medical Center; and in Spokane Valley, at 12615 E. Mission. It has outreach clinics for follow-up care and limited chemotherapy in Chewelah, Colville, Moses Lake, and Ritzville.