Floyd County Medical Center goal to offer oncology services regardless of trial outcome

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Whether or not a judge rules in the Floyd County Medical Center’s favor regarding a contested gift to support a local cancer center, FCMC intends to offer cancer treatment, the center’s chief executive officer says.

“Our hope and desire is to offer oncology services regardless of the outcome,” said Dawnett Willis, the FCMC CEO. “It would obviously make it a lot easier for us financially to receive that bequest, but it is our goal.”

Willis was referring to a bequest in the will of Herman Stille, a Nashua-area farmer who died in 2021 and left the bulk of his estate, then estimated at more than $10 million, to FCMC to establish a local cancer center.

But because of a legal disagreement over perceived conditions in the will that could alternatively send the money to Mayo Clinic for Alzheimer’s research, the estate has been tied up in Chickasaw County District Court since shortly after the will was read.

A decision in the trial regarding the issue may be announced next month (see accompanying story).

Willis said FCMC’s current major construction project includes provisions for a new pharmacy that will include the extra safety precautions needed to formulate chemotherapy drugs.

“We don’t have the capability in our current pharmacy to do that. You have to have proper ventilation and a secure hood and things like that just for the chemo, but that just shows our commitment to the goal of offering it here,” she said. “We’ve committed to use our own resources to build a new pharmacy with those capabilities, and that’s our step in the right direction.”

Whether FCMC gets the Stille funds may determine how quickly and how extensively the Medical Center is able to offer oncology services. With the funds, the plan is to use part of the new second floor addition for what would be the Stille Cancer Center.

“We’re finding the resources and working really hard to build the facility to have cancer treatment here for the communities we serve, … with or without the (Stille) funds,” Willis said.

“Obviously, it might not be to the scale that we would be able to do it as far as a nice, brand-new beautiful floor or whatever that looks like. … That might take longer to do it to that scale without those funds, but we could potentially renovate existing space or something like that to start and kind of build toward that,” she said.

Willis said FCMC knows it’s important to be able to offer oncology services to the community.

“I know we’re all committed to offering the service, but, you know, it is expensive to start new service lines, and so we have to be good stewards of our resources and make sure that we’re doing what we can and being financial responsible at the same time to make sure we’re here for many, many years to come, offering many services to the community that we serve,” Willis said.

“It is definitely top of mind that’s something that I know all of us here want to do, it’s just the timing of it, how that would lay out without these funds,” she said. “Just like with anything else we do in life, having the resources available makes it easier. That doesn’t mean we can’t do it. It just means we’d have to find other ways to do it.”