Triple Dose of Construction

Healthy growth: artist renderings of new cancer center. Courtesy Duke Medicine

The Duke University Health System will build two new buildings, a cancer center and what is being called the Duke Medicine Pavilion, a facility that will expand surgery and critical-care services at Duke University Hospital.

The two facilities will transform the landscape of the current Duke Medical Center campus by adding a total of approximately 850,000 square feet. The cancer center is expected to be completed and ready for occupancy in 2012, while the Duke Medicine Pavilion is expected to begin receiving patients a year later. The Bell Research Building was demolished to make room for the new structures.

Total project costs are estimated to be more than $700 million. The project will create as many as 1,500 jobs during construction and an estimated 1,000 permanent jobs upon completion.

Artist renderings of new medical center pavilion. Courtesy Duke Medicine

The new cancer center will consolidate outpatient cancer services and clinical research from across the campus into one multidisciplinary center. It will adjoin the current Morris Cancer Clinic and will contain 140 examination rooms, seventy-five infusion stations for chemotherapy, a pharmacy, and an outdoor garden terrace that patients will be able to use.

"Research shows that cancer care is most effective when delivered by specialists who are specifically trained and exclusively focused on cancer treatment and research," says Victor Dzau, president and CEO of the health system and chancellor for health affairs. "Providing this kind of focused, highly specialized multidisciplinary cancer care represents a distinctive way that Duke is providing special value to the community."

The Duke Medicine Pavilion will be an eight-story building and will include sixteen new operating suites, ninety-six critical-care beds, and sixty-four intermediate-care beds.

Last year, officials at the School of Medicine announced plans for a new learning center, which will be the first new facility dedicated to medical student education at Duke since the Davison Building opened in 1930.

Plans call for anywhere from three to five floors and will include a large auditorium and places to gather, dine, and study. The new building's educational areas will contain moveable walls to accommodate large-group, small-group, and individual learning; amphitheaters and function rooms; simulation laboratories; and more than 10,000 square feet of laboratories used to develop clinical skills. Students from the School of Nursing and the physician assistant program will also make use of the equipment.