Q&A With Dr. Deming: About the Four Clinics

Construction for the MercyOne Richard Deming Cancer Center is underway. Richard Deming, M.D., director for the MercyOne Des Moines Cancer Center, explains the new four clinics that will be a part of the new center – the Multidisciplinary Clinic, Survivorship Clinic, Living with Cancer Clinic and Integrative Medicine Clinic – and how they will personalize patient care.

Q: What is the importance of these four clinics?

A: At the MercyOne Richard Deming Cancer Center, we believe the most important part is the patient. The patient is a human being. We are human beings taking care of human beings, and the importance of addressing all of the different dimensions of a human is essential. This means obviously the physical but also the emotional, psychological, philosophical and spiritual.

We have the most innovative, modern technical treatment that is available but we know that being a cancer center is not fundamentally about killing cancer cells, it’s about taking care of patients and their families, which includes all the dimensions of what it means to be a human being. These clinics allow us to efficiently do the treatments that are going to take care of the cancer, but to do it in such a way that it enhances the quality of life of everyone, no matter where they are on their cancer journey.

Q: What is unique about having these four clinics as a part of the MercyOne Richard Deming Cancer Center?

A: The services we are providing in these four clinics are already being done throughout the cancer center in various locations. The unique thing is this new center will allow us to do is to bring all of these services together into one location to be able to serve patients in a patient-centered way.

Too much of health care is done at the convenience of the providers; what we want to do is make is very convenient and accessible for patients and put them in the center of the formula for improving their health. This space will allow all of these clinics to take place in one location and to improve the patient’s access to all of these services, rather than having a splintered approach.

Q: ­­Could you please describe these clinics and the impact they will have?

A: The space we are creating will be a beautiful space designed in a very innovative way to accommodate patient-centered, multidisciplinary care.

Multidisciplinary Clinic

What does a multidisciplinary clinic mean? We use the term discipline to refer to a particular specialty of medicine, so when we say multidisciplinary, we mean more than one specialist will be seeing the patient at the same time. In today’s world, when patients undergo cancer treatment, they often have up to three cancer doctors. They may have a cancer surgeon, a radiation oncologist and a medical oncologist, they might also have a specialist on the type of cancer they have.

What we are creating in our multidisciplinary clinic is a setting where patients and their families can come in after they have been diagnosed with cancer and meet with all of the specialists in the same clinic while they are there. The space we are creating will have much larger rooms, the ability for family to be there and the ability for all the different specialists to be in the clinic to see the patient. While the patient is there, we will be able to formulate an overall care plan that will integrate the care of the various specialists.

Multidisciplinary care is being done today, but the standard way is a patient will see one doctor and then that doctor’s scheduling person will call the scheduling person for another doctor’s office and a week later that patient may get seen in the other doctor’s office. This goes on serial fashion until patients finally get seen by all the specialists. This new Multidisciplinary Clinic will allow us to have the patient seen by all specialists in one setting.

It is really about patient-centered care, putting the patient at the center of the care not just philosophically but actually literally in the center with all of the other doctors coming to the patient in that clinic. Our multidisciplinary clinic will see different types of cancers on different days.”

The types of cancer we will be seeing in our Multidisciplinary Clinic include:

• Lung cancer
• Head and neck cancer
• Colorectal cancer
• Prostate cancer
• Melanoma
• Gynecologic cancer

Survivorship Clinic

This Survivorship Clinic will be for patients who have successfully completed cancer treatment and are cancer free. We know that cancer survivors have ongoing physical, psychological and emotional needs, and this clinic will be able to provide them ongoing medical care. This care will include ongoing surveillance for the cancer for which they have been treated, it will also provide screenings for other types of cancers they might be at risk for, it will also help manage lingering side effects of complications that they might have experienced from their cancer treatment and it will focus on health promotion to reduce the risk of developing a future cancer.

Some of the health promotion work that will be done in this clinic includes nutritional consultation, education on physical activity, and it will provide a link to all of our survivorship programming that we do in partnership with Above + Beyond Cancer. The Survivorship Clinic will be a way to not only provide medical care for the patients but provide a link for them to get connected to all the cancer survivorship programing that takes place.”

Living with Cancer Clinic

Many patients have incurable cancer. The concept of incurable care is very different from the concept of terminal cancer. Incurable cancer means you have a cancer that is treatable and may be controlled for years but essentially is not curable. The approach we will take in the Living with Cancer Clinic is managing cancer but also focusing on quality of life and making sure that every single day can be as good as possible.

I like to describe it as how to you find joy each and every day. I think that for patients living with cancer finding joy is an important part of life’s mission. We will focus not only on managing physical symptoms from their cancer or from symptoms that are side effects of cancer treatment, but we will focus on the philosophical approach that is living one’s life fully, finding joy daily even on a journey with incurable cancer.

Integrative Medicine Clinic

Integrative medicine is a term we use to describe various treatments and services that help improve quality of life but aren’t directly related to treating cancer. Some examples of integrative medicine include: acupuncture, chiropractic care, massage therapy, art therapy, music therapy, yoga, meditation. Those are all techniques that can help improve quality of life for individuals.

This clinic will be used by individuals throughout their cancer journey. It might be used by patients just diagnosed with cancer or beginning cancer treatment, it might be used by patients in the middle of their cancer treatment, it might be used by patients who have successfully completed their cancer treatment and are cured of their cancer, it also be used by those patients who are living with incurable cancer. The Integrative Medicine Clinic will be something that will be a benefit to everyone no matter where they are on their cancer journey.