South Nassau Communities Hospital to open new cancer center

A new and expanded cancer center will be established on the main campus of South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside to consolidate the institution’s treatment services, which currently are spread throughout multiple South Shore sites.

The hospital is the largest health care provider in its region of Long Island, but until now has not begun harnessing its cancer care under one roof. The hospital’s Gertrude and Louis Feil Cancer Center is in Valley Stream, but other components of its cancer care are provided on the main campus as well as in Rockville Centre.

“We have all of the services that you would find in a comprehensive cancer center, but right now they are located in different places,” said Richard J. Murphy, South Nassau’s president and chief executive.

The project will involve remodeling an existing wing of the hospital to accommodate treatment services, including chemotherapy infusion.

“These are preliminary plans,” said Joe Calderone, the hospital’s senior vice president for corporate communications and development. “It’s probably a timeline of about 36 months.”

The $10 million project is bolstered by a $1 million gift from the Feil Charitable Lead Annuity, which in the past has given the hospital more than $5 million. In 2011, a $3 million donation supported expansion of South Nassau’s Gertrude and Louis Feil Cancer Center in Valley Stream.

“It will be so much easier to be able to tell a patient that you can see the medical oncologist down the hall rather than three miles away in Rockville Centre,” said Dr. Rajiv Datta, chairman of surgery and medical director of the Feil Cancer Center.

Because cancer treatment is a multidisciplinary enterprise, involving medical oncologists, surgeons, pathologists and nurses who jointly discuss a patient’s case, having team members in one place is a major advantage, Datta said.

South Nassau’s proposed consolidation arrives amid explosive growth in cancer services Islandwide.

Southside Hospital in Bay Shore opened its Imbert Cancer Center, a 46,000-square-foot facility, in October. Southside, a division of Northwell Health, transformed a former King Kullen supermarket at a cost of $46.5 million into the Imbert facility.

Starting in 2013, Northwell invested more than $175 million to expand cancer treatment services at its Cancer Institute, including an $84 million expansion in Lake Success.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center will build a $140 million outpatient treatment and research facility at Mitchel Field as part of the Nassau Coliseum project. Memorial already operates three facilities on Long Island — in Rockville Centre, Hauppauge and the Commack center, which recently underwent a major expansion.

Between 2006 and 2016, St. Francis, The Heart Center, expanded substantially into cancer treatment, and remodeled the nearby former headquarters of the Pall Corp. on Northern Boulevard in Roslyn into a 189,000-square-foot cancer center.

South Nassau Communities Hospital, however, has a special place in the hearts of the Feil family, owners of a real estate investment, development and management company in Manhattan.

“South Nassau is the Feil family’s community hospital, and we remain committed to supporting its mission of providing quality health care services to the South Shore communities of Nassau County,” said Jeffrey Feil, chief executive of the Feil Organization.