Image courtesy of Fox Architects
In days past, patients needing bone-marrow transplants—often after chemotherapy or for diseases like leukemia and sickle-cell anemia—were confined to a hospital bed while recovering. Thanks to recent innovations like reduced-intensity transplants, though, many patients have a smoother recovery. Now, Saint Louis University Hospital is going one more step by creating one of the region’s first outpatient bone-marrow transplant centers, set to open in October.
The $3 million center, which will include 14 infusion rooms and five exam rooms for pre- and post-transplant appointments, will be located inside Saint Louis University Cancer Center. The center will accommodate a range of bone-marrow transplants: 1) autologous transplants, where the patient’s own cells can be used; 2) allogeneic transplants, using a volunteer donor with a similar tissue type; and 3) transplants that use umbilical-cord blood.
“The major goal of the center is to increase the number of transplants per year,” says Friedrich Schuening, director of the division of hematology and oncology at the cancer center, who opened a similar facility at Vanderbilt University. “I think we can do at least 150 combined inpatient and outpatient transplants per year; when I left Vanderbilt, which had a similar-sized facility, we were doing about 250 transplants per year, so that’s a significant capacity.”
What makes the new center so appealing is the outpatient aspect. “The main advantage is patient satisfaction—I have yet to find a patient who prefers a hospital bed over being at home,” says Schuening. “It also frees up inpatient bed capacity, which is always at a premium, and it reduces the cost of the procedure and treatment.”
The prerequisites for running an outpatient center, Schuening explains, include keeping the clinic open 24/7 and ensuring that patients have a competent caregiver at all times. And since the beginning of the year, Schuening has been recruiting and training nurse practitioners, whom he says will be the backbone of the program.
