Centra clinic offers new options for women’s health

Carilion Clinic specialists in women’s pelvic cancers will be staffing a weekly specialty referral-only clinic at Centra Virginia Baptist Hospital, beginning in October.

The Centra Gynecological Oncology Clinic makes it possible for women with advanced cancer to continue to be seen in Lynchburg, rather than have to go out of the area.

In addition, area gynecologists will have access to on-site cancer specialist consultation and surgical assistance.

Carilion’s Dr. Dennis Scribner Jr., and Dr. Natalie Gould, gynecological oncologists, were recently granted staff privileges by Centra.

The Carilion team stepped in last year to continue the clinic, which had been run by Dr. Laurel Rice, formerly with the University of Virginia and now a department chairman with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine.

Rice established the Centra-UVa clinic in the late 1990s, said Carolyn Jacques, Centra vice president of nursing.

“Because we don’t have any of those sub-specialists in Lynchburg, it provides services in the community for patients who need that care and service,” said Jacques.

About 200 patients currently use the clinic in the Rivermont Avenue hospital.

Scribner met with administrators from Centra and with area OB-Gyns — including those from Danville and Bedford — to discuss continuing the clinic.

Because their specialty is reproductive-tract cancers, the specialists can stage cancer more easily as well as help evaluate questionable pelvic masses and assist with surgery.

Patients most often have uterine, cervical or ovarian cancer.

Lynchburg gynecology specialist Dr. Matthew Tompkins said the surgical areas in which the oncologist surgical specialty is able to help is lymph-gland removal and the more complicated cancers that have spread.

Having the weekly clinic here, said Tompkins, means “we can keep those patients here, so they don’t have to travel and are close to their families. It is excellent for our community.”

Patients can continue chemotherapy or radiation with Centra and see the Carilion cancer specialists at the clinic. If they are critically ill with extensive cancer, they would go to Roanoke for treatment in the same way patients had formerly gone to Charlottesville, Scribner said.

The clinic is by referral, but women who want to come for evaluation can have their family physician contact the clinic.

Scribner described a typical patient as a woman who has gone through menopause and begins to have bleeding. She has a biopsy; it shows cancer, and her primary-care doctor refers her to the clinic where the gynecological oncologists, who work with cancer patients almost exclusively, then evaluate her.