Premier Rachel Notley toured the ongoing construction of the new Calgary Cancer Centre at the Foothills Medical Centre on Monday and confirmed the project remains on schedule and under budget.
Once complete, the centre is poised to become the largest free-standing cancer facility in Canada and will consist of two curved buildings connected by a green space. The building will house in excess of 100 patient exam rooms, more than 100 chemotherapy beds, 160 in-patient beds and offers twice the space for clinical trials of the Tom Baker Cancer Centre.
Sunil Verma, medical director of the Tom Baker Cancer Centre, says the new facility is desperately needed.
“Systemic treatment, that is chemotherapy, has gone up by 10 per cent,” explained Verma. “Our radiation volumes have increased by eight per cent and we’ll continue to see that five to eight per cent increase. So this centre is needed by our teams, is needed by our staff, our patients, their families.”
“The number of patients who are coming through the doors continues to increase. The number of visits – we were at around 185,000 about two years ago and we’re closer now to above 200,000.”
To date, 37,000 cubic metres of concrete has been poured to form what will become the radiation therapy department that will house 12 vaults made of concrete and steel.
“Those vaults will have six foot thick walls to protect patients and families from radiation exposure,” explained Premier Notley. “Taken together, they will nearly double the current Tom Baker Cancer Centre’s capacity to treat patients with radiation therapy.”
Notley says the centre is the single biggest infrastructure project that is currently underway in the province. “This is a project that had been promised for years, in fact decades, and it is a project that is now getting done.”
With files from CTV’s Brad MacLeod
