BC Cancer Centre for the North in Prince George not only continues to provide life-saving care closer to home, also continues to be a hub of innovation.
“It's pretty exciting to think that we've now been open for 10 years and that we have been able to treat more patients in the north closer to home than we thought we would be able to,” said Dr. Stacy Miller, Executive Medical Director at BC Cancer Prince George.
She said two-third of the patients the centre serves live more than an hour from Prince George.
Dr. Robert Olson was the first physician hired to the Centre for the North and moved from Vancouver to help open it back in November 2012.
Now he is research lead at the centre and his work in precision radiation therapy has become world renowned.
“We're trying to use innovation and the technology that we have, as well as the treatment planning developments, many of which were developed here on site, to help to improve technology and improve the treatment that we're delivering,” explained Dr. Miller.
She said the Cancer Centre for the North was built by a team that, right from the beginning, valued care closer to home, treatment in a beautifully, culturally safe space, and implementing research and teaching.
“What we know is that when we're doing exciting research, our goal is to be patient care. But we're also attracting professionals who want to come and work on Dr. Olsen’s team.”
She said one of things that has improved over the past 10 years of cancer care is the ability to shorten treatment times.
“Patients would have one treatment every day for multiple weeks and some types of cancers still need that daily treatment, over or up to seven weeks. But for some cancers, we're now able to deliver that treatment over a much shorter periods of time,” explained Dr. Miller.
“That's really important when you're thinking about travelling from a distance for care.”
She said some treatments they’re now able to do in five treatments which would have previously taken four weeks.
“It's been so exciting to see progression and radiation, technology, radiation innovation, but also chemotherapy drugs,” said Dr. Miller.
“Right now there are more than 500 different chemotherapy recipes that we can deliver. In a small centre, one may feel like ‘well, maybe we can only deliver a certain part of that or do we need to be travelling away from home to deliver these more complex protocols?’ And no, we don't.”
She added that one of the exciting things that the centre would like to work on in the future is having chemotherapy - which is also known as systemic therapy - trials come to Prince George.
“So that way we can be attracting the same kind of talent and enthusiasm for research that we have from the radiation zone. How can we do that to build medical oncology clinical trials as well? And then even better than that, how do we use systemic therapy and radiation together to even improve outcomes further? So there’s lots of exciting work to do.”
The Centre for the North is one of six regional centres across the province, and provides care and support to patients with cancer across Northern B.C.
