Moffitt Cancer Center outpost opens in Port Tampa Bay
Amenity-rich Water Street can now count a major health care player among its ranks.
Moffitt Cancer Center will operate an 850-square-foot resource center in Terminal 2 of Port Tampa Bay, close to where cruise ships sail in and out of the bay. Cruise passengers and maritime workers are some of the main targets.
“Instead of coming off (the boat) burnt and blistered, maybe they’ll stop by and get some sunscreen,” said Vernon Sondak, Moffitt’s director of cutaneous oncology. Sondak leads the organization’s melanoma initiatives.
Visitors at the nearby Florida Aquarium and shoppers at Sparkman Wharf, a Water Street food hub, are other targets.
“There’s a lot more to Channelside than cruises,” Sondak said.
The education center is a small component of Moffitt’s expansion beyond its flagship University of South Florida campus. A new hospital focused on treating solid tumors will open across the street from the outpatient clinic on McKinley Drive later this month.
Another outpatient clinic will open in Hillsborough County’s South Shore next year. And a sprawling, 750-acre campus in Pasco County will launch in 2025 with state-of-the-art treatment options like FLASH radiation therapy, said Patrick Hwu, Moffitt’s president and CEO. FLASH targets tumors in a matter of seconds, not weeks.
The scope of the education center is limited compared to Moffitt’s other grand plans. Few screenings will occur on the premises. Instead, the center will be lightly staffed most days so that passersby can stop in, ask questions, learn when they should start getting screened for certain cancers and schedule a screening at another Moffitt location.
If there’s an event nearby or a cruise taking off, Hwu said, more volunteers will be on the premises to get visitors through the doors.
“Maybe (cruise passengers are) going to come a day early or stay a couple days late to get some cancer screening done,” he said.
The center is intended to be revenue-neutral, Sondak said. Moffitt is leasing a previously unoccupied space essentially for free from Port Tampa Bay, and its operations are bolstered by a $50,000 donation from the Tampa Bay Lightning Foundation and the associated Lightning Community Heroes program. The port is treating the venture as an act of community service, CEO Paul Anderson said.
“There’s no intention that this will create revenue for the port,” he said. “The port touches millions of people in our community.”
Hwu listed off numbers that he said make this type of outreach essential. Florida has the second-most cancer deaths in the nation, at 49,000 per year, he said. And 40% of cancers are preventable with proper screening.
Hwu is hoping to prevent more cancers among passengers on the 300 cruises expected to sail through Tampa’s port this year.
