Cancer center moves into Mt. Pleasant's Frick Hospital

Cancer patients who were treated at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center at Arnold Palmer Pavilion in East Huntingdon, have a new site to receive their chemotherapy — Excela Square at Frick in Mt. Pleasant.

The UPMC Hillman Cancer Center at Arnold Palmer Pavilion, a joint venture between UPMC Hillman Cancer Center and Greensburg-based Excela Health, recently moved from its Bessemer Road office, where it had been treating patients for the past 15 years, to the Excela Frick Hospital campus on South Church Street. It is the third site for the Hillman Cancer at Arnold Palmer Pavilion. The original site is at Mountain View and a second site is in North Huntingdon at Excela Square at Norwin.

“This helps (cancer) patients so that they don’t have to travel to Pittsburgh (for treatment). We have the same kind of treatment here as at the Hillman Cancer Treatment in Pittsburgh,” said Dr. John Morcos, medical oncologist and hematologist at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center at Excela Square at Frick.

The new site has 12 chairs to give chemotherapy to outpatients in semi-private pods, four more than the previous site, as well as private rooms for treatment.

The renovation of the space, which at one time probably housed patient rooms at H.C. Frick Hospital, was part of the five-year, $20 million overall renovation project at Excela Frick Hospital, said Robin Jennings, Excela spokeswoman. The plans to move the cancer treatment facility into a portion of the second floor of Excela Square at Frick have been in the works for about a year, Morcos said.

The advantage of having the cancer treatment center on the hospital campus is, if a patient has a medical emergency while receiving treatment, they can go to the emergency department without the need of an ambulance, Morcos said.

They already had an incident where a person needed emergency medical treatment and were able to contact rapid response at Frick, said Mandee Mikeska, a certified medical practitioner at the cancer center.

“It’s nice to have the support of emergency medicine right at our fingerprints,” Mikeska said.

Those patients needing radiation will need to go to the Arnold Palmer Pavilion, which has a concrete-lined structure to conduct the radiation treatments.

The staff typically see 26 patients a day at the Mt. Pleasant center, said Thomas Pyo, general operations manager for UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. With Mt. Pleasant located just a few miles north of the Fayette County border, some of those patients come from as far away at the Uniontown area, Pyo said.

Among patients receiving treatment at the site, Morcos said the most-common cancer among women is breast cancer and most common among men is prostate cancer.

“It is most gratifying when you can cure somebody who would have died otherwise,” Morcos said.

During his time as an oncologist, Morcos said he has seen cancer treatments progress to the point where patients have a longer term survival rate and “a better quality of life.”