A new Bermuda cancer clinic – the first step towards the goal of total cancer management in the Island – is taking shape right now at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital (KEMH).

As part of planned upgrades and refurbishment of the current Paget facility, work has begun on a clinic dedicated to oncology. A hospital spokesperson said it is hoped the new clinic will be operational by the end of next month.

What's the big deal about that? Well at the moment there's no one-stop-shop for cancer care – any type of cancer care – in Bermuda. According to Dr. Terence Sparling, the Island's only oncologist, too many of the functions of caring for a person with cancer happen in isolation on the Island.

For example, you may discover a lump during a visit to your general practitioner or gynaecologist. In either case they will refer you to another facility for screening.

That facility will screen you and if the results are positive, you'll then have to go to either Dr. Sparling or a surgeon. In either case you'll have to go for more tests possibly in another facility. Then if chemotherapy or radiation treatment is suggested you have to go somewhere different yet again and it may be overseas.

At the same time you may need some education on the type of cancer you're fighting and the advice you get from so many different facilities may leave you disoriented.

The tumour you have should be tracked not just for your own progress, but also to enable epidemiologists to discover trends that may be developing on the Island.

Discovery of a trend can help identify the cause and that can lead to better prevention techniques.

And at the other end of the spectrum, palliative care can be more traumatic for patients who have been moved around a non-cohesive system.

Dr. Sparling has advocated a joint approach to cancer care in Bermuda and the new clinic will see prevention, screening, treatments and medical expertise all in one place.

"We are aiming to create a country specific cancer care programme," said Dr. Sparling. Currently we do nothing in terms of total care because no organisations are working together."

King Edward VII Memorial Hospital has teamed with the Dana Faber Cancer Institute in the US to help develop management models for tackling the various types of cancer in Bermuda.

Dr. Sparling revealed that Dr. William Oh, the noted Genitourinary Oncologist with the Dana Faber Cancer Institute in Boston, is interested in doing research looking at prostate cancers in blacks on the Island.

Because of our small size and small degree of migration, the Island is ideal for Dr. Oh's research.

According to Dr. Sparling, KEMH will use the expertise of the Dana Faber Cancer Institute to build a programme specifically addressing prostate cancer care in Bermuda.

"Then we hope to use this process as the paradigm for tackling the next type of cancer we seek to develop a plan for," he added. And he said that breast cancer was likely to be the next cancer for which a plan would be developed.

While stressing he did not want to alarm the public, Dr. Sparling revealed that breast cancer is often more aggressive and begins at an earlier age, for local black women. "We need to look at the pathology of it here," he said.

The topic is also of interest to Dr. Oh, as black women the world over are more at risk for contracting the disease.