Sloan Kettering to close RVC office

In his State of the County speech last week, Nassau Executive Edward Mangano announced plans for Memorial Sloan Kettering to close its Rockville Centre cancer center and relocate it to the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum property in Uniondale.

The plan was announced on March 11 during Mangano’s address, in which he said that Sloan Kettering will be buying five acres of property on the Coliseum site from the county to build a brand new, state-of-the-art medical center.

The current cancer center is on the property of Mercy Medical Center. It is an outpatient center that provides chemotherapy and radiation treatments for cancer patients. Mercy declined to comment on the plan.

The center will not be closing immediately, though: the plan is to relocate in 2018, when the lease with Mercy expires. The deal has not been finalized, either. According to a spokeswoman for Sloan Kettering, the deal is still in negotiations. Additionally, the center would still have to establish a Certificate of Need with the state Department of Health, as well as receive approval from various county and town oversight boards. A spokesperson for Mercy had no comment.

The new facility would be much larger than the one in Rockville Centre: the plan is to build a 100,000 square-foot building, compared to the 25,000 square feet now occupied at Mercy.

All of the clinical trials that are being offered at the Rockville Centre facility would also be carried over to the new building. “We also hope to expand the number of clinical trials we offer,” said Sloan Kettering Spokeswoman Courtney Nowak.

Nowak said that the Rockville Centre facility currently employees 80 staff members. Those jobs would be preserved in the transition, she said.