Rockwood Clinic PS, in cooperation with Cancer Care Northwest PS, plans to open a cancer treatment center on the Deaconess Medical Center campus later this year.


Rockwood, a major physicians group here, has leased 10,400 square feet of floor space on the seventh floor of the Deaconess Health & Education Center, at 910 W. Fifth, and has started work on upgrades to that space, says Christine Eriksen, Rockwoods director of public relations and marketing. The center is scheduled to open in late September.


Rockwood President and interim CEO Dr. Kevin Sweeny says that Rockwood will move its cancer center to the new space from 7,000 square feet of floor space on the fourth floor of its main building, at 400 E. Fifth. That center includes a chemotherapy unit, a multidisciplinary urology-cancer team, a high-risk breast cancer clinic, a lung cancer clinic, and a 48-hour second-opinion service for recently diagnosed cancer patients. The center participates in clinical trials and offers to cancer patients nutrition consultation, financial counseling, and individual and family counseling.


Cancer Care Northwest will provide radiation therapy to the cancer center, which Sweeny says will allow Rockwood Cancer Treatment Center to provide more comprehensive services in one location than at its current location.


We are excited about this center and view it as a significant improvement in our services, he says.


About 20 people will staff the cancer center, including four physicians and a nurse practitioner. Current Rockwood physicians Dr. Kirk Lund, Dr. Jay Wittenkeller, and Dr. Ted Keyes will move to the new center. Dr. Corliss Newman, who currently practices in Rochester, N.Y., is expected to join that team next month and will work at the new center.


Eriksen says Rockwood plans to move some established services, perhaps an anti-coagulation clinic, into the cancer-center space in its main building after the cancer center moves.


The seventh floor of the Deaconess Health & Education Center, where the cancer center will be located, is one of the four floors Deaconess added to the tower in 2002, making it a 10-story structure. Since work on that expansion wrapped up, those four additional floors have remained vacant and unimproved.


Deaconess spokesman Tracy Ellig says the cancer center will be the first to be located on one of those four upper floors.


R.B. Goebel General Contractor Inc., of Spokane, is the contractor on the cancer-center space improvements, which are expected to cost about $750,000 to complete, and OMS Inc., of Spokane, designed the space.