Jim Fair
Signage has been posted at the Village at Pelham to announce the addition of the Gibbs Cancer Center at Pelham. The announcement is scheduled Thursday morning.
A $6 million Gibbs Center facility was opened in Gaffney recently to serve Cherokee County cancer patients. The Greer facility will offer patients the same multidisciplinary care available at the Spartanburg Regional Gibbs Cancer Center.
The Cancer Center at Pelham will feature a 10,000 square foot circular atrium with a 30-foot ceiling outside and 25-foot ceiling inside the glass enclosure. A healing garden will be planted outside facing the south sun. All patients’ rooms will face the healing garden. Rick Webel of Innocenti & Webel, the landscape architect of the Milliken gardens will design the Cancer Center at Pelham gardens.
“We believe light (large windows), healing, water (fountain), botanical garden and amenities we have at Spartanburg Regional will serve our Greer patients well,” Beverly Henson-Hicks said. “We wanted to get everything under a one-stop and shop under one roof. The windows will allow the center to be lit with plenty of natural light.”
Hicks said former patients who lived in the Greer area were part of a committee that made suggestions for the Cancer Center at Pelham. “We asked them ‘what would you like to see’ in Greer? They said they wanted to come into a sterile environment with more of the Hyatt effect,” Hicks said. “They wanted a comfortable, private room and to face the beautiful gardens.”
“The main goal of the advisory committee was to offer the same here at the Gibbs Center,” Hicks said. “To the left of the atrium will be the medical oncology unit and the right is radiation.”
The multidiscipline clinic will also be engaged with the Cancer Center at Pelham patients. It’s an informative diagnosis of individual cancer patients that results with each doctor, through a patient’s X-rays, discuss the disease and care plan prior to the treatment. After the doctor’s results are scored, it is matched with an on-line tool suggesting the action is favorable or an alternative care plan is suggested. “The most important thing is that the patient has a care plan after the doctors come out of one of these sessions,” Hicks said.
The metastic breast cancer will have mammography and CT services in the same building. The Bearden-Josey Center for Breast Health, named for the Gibbs Center founding doctors James Bearden and Julian Josey, will be an extension of that facility at the Cancer Center at Pelham.
A linear accelerator using TrueBeam radiation, “is the closest and greatest thing for patients getting radiation treatment,” Hicks said. TrueBeam cuts the radiation treatment time from the traditional eight weeks to treating a small tumor in the body in one to five days.
The Cancer Center at Pelham will be associated with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Community Cancer Center and the MD Anderson Cancer Center Physicians Network. The Gibbs Center is one of 10 original sites for the NCI and the only one in associated with it in the Carolinas.