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Change of plans; it’s a whole new building

Plans to expand the Central Alberta Cancer Centre have been dumped in favour of building a new facility at Red Deer’s hospital.
CancerCentre2RandySept22_20100922165310
Stacy Larsen passes fellow local cancer survivor Evan Young

Plans to expand the Central Alberta Cancer Centre have been dumped in favour of building a new facility at Red Deer’s hospital.

The new $59.5-million centre, which will bring radiation treatment to Red Deer, will be about three times the size of the existing centre. It will be a separate building but will be connected to the Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre through a hallway for transfering patients.

Brenda Hubley, project lead on the Radiation Treatment Corridor with Alberta Health Services, said construction cost and the size of the new building are identical to previous expansion plan and it will be built in the same location, beside the existing cancer centre on the southwest side of the hospital.

She said new construction was always going to be part of the project.

“In going through our planning process, looking at configuration and a variety of things, the decision was just made that we’ll go with a complete new facility and the existing space will return back to the hospital so it provides additional expansion for them as well,” said Hubley at the sod turning ceremony on Wednesday for the new centre.

The current cancer centre moved into a new building in 2005 that tripled the size of the centre and cost $4.5 million to build.

Hubley said the challenges that come with renovation, like moving people out of an existing space during the work, will no longer be a problem.

It is hoped that construction will begin this year and be complete in early 2013. The province contributed $46 million for construction of the state-of-the-art facility and the federal government provided $13.5 million for equipment, furniture and opening costs.

Central Alberta Cancer Centre’s new building is part of a provincial strategy to open a corridor of cancer treatment centres across Alberta to improve access. In addition to existing facilities in Calgary and Edmonton, Lethbridge Cancer Centre opened in June and a centre will be built in Grande Prairie.

Once the corridor is complete, the Albertans who have to travel 100 km or more for radiation would be reduced to eight per cent from 28 per cent.

Alberta Health Services board chair Ken Hughes said the new centres will take pressure off facilities in Calgary and Edmonton that are extremely “tapped out.”

The two-storey centre in Red Deer, with 54,000-square-foot, has plans for three radiation vaults, only two of which would be used initially. There is also space for a fourth vault, if required.

It will also have more treatment and examination rooms, outpatient clinics, a medical day unit and a pharmacy.

The building will be engineered to support up to five more floors for future expansion.

Stacy Larsen, 41, of Red Deer, was diagnosed with stage four rectal cancer three years ago and had to travel five days a week for six weeks for radiation therapy in Edmonton.

If treatment had been available in Red Deer, the five to six hours it took to travel and be treated would have been cut down to about 30 minutes.

Larsen said the travel was exhausting and put stress on him and his family.

For a cancer patient, when there’s less stress in your life, there’s more room for hope, he said.

“That makes all the difference in the world.”

szielinski@www.reddeeradvocate.com