One of the leaders of local health care will be moving down the road.

Bruce A. Gordon, director of Central Texas Veterans Health Care System, will spend his last day as the head of the local VA facility on Friday, Oct. 3. The following Monday he will show up for work a few blocks to the west at Scott & White Memorial Hospital.

“I have an opportunity to do something new that stays in the same theme as what I found so exciting at the VA,” Gordon said.

At the VA, Gordon’s goal was to build services and create more access for veterans. At Scott & White he will continue in the same vein, only this time for the private sector.

Gordon will be associate executive director for systems cancer services. He will work on creating a service line that encompasses all the Scott & White clinics and hospitals.

The first step in creating a service line is to have a clear understanding of what is available - an inventory, Gordon said. There are many resources available, not only in the cancer treatment center, but in individual departments, at different hospitals and with new partners.

Then it can be determined what oncology services should be available at every clinic, what level of service should be found at the hospitals and what needs to be reserved for specialty treatment centers.

Anybody who comes into the system through a clinic or affiliated hospital will be treated for basic services as close to home as possible, Gordon said.

If the diagnosis warrants it, he said, the treatment may take place at a regional location, or at the Cancer Treatment Center in Temple for the most serious cases.

“We hope to pursue a building of our own, like they did with the medical clinics, with all the radiation therapies, cyclotrons and more,” Gordon said. “That’s what I’ll be asked to work on.”

Gordon said the team assembled at Scott & White is incredible.

“They understand what it means to reach out to people,” he said. “They understand the issues of access. They understand the issues of people finding their way to health care and overcoming the notions of concerns or fears or apprehensions.”

The range of cancer treatments available at Scott & White is extensive and may be known regionally, Gordon said.

“We want to take that program and make it nationally recognized or internationally recognized,” he said. “That is so exciting and I’m going to be a part of it.”

Gordon said during the interview process for the job he and Dr. Arthur Frankel, director of the Vasicek Cancer Treatment Center and Cancer Research Institute, talked about how to tie research and academics into the programs.

“I left that interview hoping that I could be a part of this,” he said.

Gordon said he wants to take care of the operations, of increasing that service line to cancer care, leaving Frankel to concentrate on clinical applications and pulling the departments together.

Drugs created at the Cancer Research Center are in trials at MD Anderson in Houston.

“The fact that quality of work is being recognized by such a prominent research enterprise is a credit to Frankel,” Gordon said.

The job will include creating awareness, including among the staff, of what is available at Scott & White, he said.

“They have a vision and I want to be a part of that,” Gordon said.

Until a VA director is named Thomas Smith, associate director for resources, will serve as interim director.