New cancer center at McKay-Dee will put advanced care closer to home

SALT LAKE CITY — In a couple of years, cancer patients in the Ogden area won’t have to travel as far to receive advanced care. McKay-Dee Hospital began construction Wednesday on a new cancer center that will take up much of the hospital’s first floor.

Hospital administrator Mike Clark said it will bring medical providers and support teams together in new offices as well as provide new facilities for care. He said a new linear accelerator will be among the resources available to patients needing radiation treatment.

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“Those patients come in every day for five to seven weeks, and if you were driving, if you lived in North Ogden, let’s say, you can drive to McKay-Dee, it’s a 15- to 20-minute drive or you can drive an hour and ten minutes to Salt Lake,” Clark told KSL Newsradio.

The cancer center will also include four more hospital infusion bays. And there will be eight additional chemotherapy infusion bays, raising the total to 24.

Clark said patients will also have access to all the resources of Intermountain Healthcare via telehealth.

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“We can have specialists available to work with you and your local medical oncologist through telehealth services to get the specialized treatment for your specific cancer,” he said.

The hospital raised over $4 million in donations to fund the new cancer center. One of the largest donations came from the Smith family in memory of Jimmy Ashment, who died in 2019. His wife, Celeste Ashment, called the donation a “great legacy . . . for my kids.”