Sloan Kettering Breaks Ground On New Long Island Facility

Last week, Nassau County celebrated the groundbreaking of the new Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Uniondale, which is being built adjacent to the renovated Nassau Coliseum at the Nassau Hub.

The 140,000-square-foot facility is being built on the southwest portion of the Coliseum property, and will employ about 250 people. The site is a large improvement over Sloan Kettering's current Long Island location, which is on the grounds of Mercy medical Center in Rockville Centre. The new facility is larger and will allow Sloan Kettering to offer more services and treatments, as well as employ more people.

The new facility will offer surgical, medical, and radiation oncology consultations; chemotherapy; radiation therapy; MRI, CT, PET/CT, ultrasound, and mammography; immunotherapy treatments; genetic counseling; pain management support; social work services; nutritional counseling and more.

Construction on the new Sloan Kettering facility is already underway, as is construction on an adjacent five-story parking garage. The new facility is scheduled to open in 2019. When it does, Sloan Kettering will close its Rockville Centre facility and move all the staff to the new Uniondale location.

"It is an honor and privilege to have a global health care leader like Memorial Sloan Kettering invest in Nassau County," said County Executive Ed Mangano. "This new state-of-the-art outpatient facility will offer critical cancer care to patients without the wear and tear of traveling to Manhattan. The project will also allow for the continued growth of Nassau’s health care industry, and make Nassau’s Hub the center for innovation in the healthcare field."

According to Sloan Kettering, nearly 22 percent of its current patients reside in Nassau, Suffolk and eastern Queens, and many opt to receive care locally. As cancer care has shifted to the outpatient setting, the demand for outpatient services has exploded, resulting in a need to develop larger, freestanding facilities where patients can receive care and then return home later in the day.

"The demand for services grew rather rapidly at Rockville Centre, and it quickly became evident that our ability to deliver care optimally was only limited by space," said Richard Barakat, MD, FACS, director of Sloan Kettering's Regional Care Network. "With this much larger facility, we'll be able to do this more seamlessly."

Rendering: Memorial Sloan Kettering. Photo: Nassau County.