Scheduled to open on Valentine's Day, Munson Healthcare's Smith Family Breast Health Center has been created on a foundation of caring.
Major donations have helped make the $3.8 million, 8,000-square-foot center a reality, including a $1 million gift from Dudley and Barbara Smith. Doctors intimately involved in caring for women weighed in with another substantial donation when the 19-member Grand Traverse Radiologists practice chipped in $250,000.
The project, which is $920,000 away from full funding, has also received donations from individuals or small groups. Some benefactors include a boy who gave proceeds of a lemonade stand, high school students who held special fund raisers, volunteers running haunted houses and Kay Jerome, owner of Kay's downtown, who again earmarked money for two weeks last month from sales of special handbags.
"There's a lot of widespread community support for this idea,” said Desiree Worthington, president of the Munson Healthcare Regional Foundation. "When you have a project that is as important and as needed as the Breast Health Center is to northwest Michigan, people will get behind it.”
The Smith Family Breast Health Center will bring under one roof screening, diagnostic and other services such as minimally-invasive breast biopsies, bone density testing and breast ultrasound.
The center is the culmination of a vision to provide efficient and compassionate for the one in seven women who over a lifetime will have breast cancer. Estimates project that 23,000 women a year will visit the center, which is situated in the Copper Ridge Development on Silver Lake Road.
"It has been identified by our community members and Munson Medical Center, there's no doubt that this is a tremendous need,” said Kathleen McManus, senior vice president at Munson Medical Center. "This has been in our conversation for seven years.”
"The community members who have been involved in this, there is tremendous excitement,” she added. "Also, the emotion around this particular facility has been great,”
No more will patients travel among two different locations for appointments, sit knee to knee in a waiting room or hear results amidst a busy bustling office. Instead the center will include rooms for private consultation, an education room and immediate support and education after a diagnosis. A boutique on site will allow women to consult with private vendors about prosthetics, wigs and specialized clothing.
Less stress and greater service will be key to the new center.
"We just saw it as a really great project, it's just a natural expansion of what we need to do,” said Dr. Deborah Crowe, a member of the Grand Traverse Radiologists who has been practicing in Traverse City since 1999.
Bringing breast-health-related services under one roof has been a vision of area cancer survivors for a few years. Ruth Ann LaMott was part of a group of citizens and medical professionals who successfully advocated for better support for women with breast cancer. Their efforts launched the Navigator Program in 2000, which matched as mentors breast cancer survivors with newly diagnosed women.
The group's next vision was to have a coordinated, comprehensive breast health center, which they also proposed not be bundled with a cancer treatment center. LaMott joined a Munson Healthcare Foundation committee as co-chair, helping bring the concept to fruition. "I think that this has been a project that has been initiated by women in the community,” said LaMott, a 22-year breast cancer survivor who is also a volunteer in the Navigator program. "It's really been their involvement that has really pushed this forward.”