Building on Excellence

Over the past year, if you’d driven up to the Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI), you would have seen the bones of a new building emerge from the hillside. When it’s completed, the Kathryn F. Kirk Center for Comprehensive Cancer Care and Women’s Cancers will offer HCI a resource it urgently needs.

“We need more space. We need more space particularly in our inpatient units,” says Don Milligan, executive director of the Cancer Hospital at HCI. “We currently have 100 inpatient beds and (pre-pandemic) our average daily census was 83. 83 beds were filled or 83 percent, the math is easy.”

Patients trust HCI to help them navigate through the extraordinarily difficult circumstances that a cancer diagnosis brings for them and their families. The need to expand HCI was born from a desire to give as many patients as possible the attention and care they deserve.

When the decision was made to expand, work began to raise the funding to build the building. Through the hard work of the Huntsman Cancer Foundation, and helped by HCI’s reputation for excellent and compassionate care, the money was raised. Within twelve months of the fundraising start, the money was there to move ahead with construction.With funding in place, construction kicked off in early 2020… just as the COVID-19 pandemic was on the rise. The pandemic threw the world into disarray, and those working on the Kathryn F. Kirk Center came together to figure out how to move forward in the face of so much uncertainty. Would the construction crews be hit by COVID? Would building materials become difficult to acquire? Would the economic turmoil push the project over budget?

Every major construction project takes an army of people to complete, and the Kathryn F. Kirk Center is no different. Overcoming the challenges presented by the pandemic meant it was all hands on deck to plan, adjust, and move forward. The work has paid off. As the winter of 2020 begins to recede into the spring of 2021, the center is quickly taking shape with construction on schedule and on budget.

“Hundreds of people are involved in our groups, committees, and user groups,” says Milligan, “so this is very much a team effort from our employees, our providers, our architect, and our contractor, Layton.”

So many have invested so much to weather the challenges of the past year and make the Kathryn F. Kirk Center for Comprehensive Cancer Care and Women’s Cancers a reality. When it’s completed in fall 2022, the center will join the impressive list of major construction projects completed as part of the Campus Transformation effort.