Seeing the Whole Person

Supportive care is a bedrock pillar of City of Hope’s mission. We are leaders in providing world-class, whole-patient care in which a person’s physical, mental, emotional, practical and spiritual needs all receive attention. Study after study confirms that this approach works: Supportive care improves cancer outcomes. That’s why we were the first in the United States to fully integrate supportive care into patients’ clinical care.

Since debuting our supportive care model on our Duarte, California, campus 15 years ago, we have trained over 5,000 health professionals across the country in supportive care methods, and more than 400,000 people have benefited from supportive care medicine at City of Hope®.  The Sheri & Les Biller Patient and Family Resource Center is at the heart of our commitment to providing a network of support for patients and their loved ones. The Biller Center integrates City of Hope’s many supportive care services under one umbrella, including classes, support groups, spiritual care offerings and resources for managing cancer treatment. The visionary investment of The Sheri and Les Biller Family Foundation continues to expand the supportive care program at City of Hope that gives patients more happy, active days."

Our new Arthur M. Coppola Family Chair in Supportive Care Medicine, Andrew T. Leitner, M.D., is working to bake that model into every oncology team across all our facilities nationwide, to go beyond treating disease to focus on the larger concerns of patients and their families, and to providing easy access to resources. 

It’s “an approach that puts the patient’s total needs at the center,” he says. 

Putting patients first also means leveraging our resources and expertise to be the primary cancer treatment center for fighting the most prevalent malignancies, such as breast cancer, the second leading cause of cancer death in women. Our survival rates for breast cancer exceed the national average at all stages, and we offer access to more than 100 ongoing innovative breast cancer clinical trials. 

Putting patients first also means taking on the tough cases and attacking rare cancers that most other institutions are unable to treat.

In May 2023, a City of Hope surgical team successfully removed a rare sarcoma from a young graduate student who’d been turned away from other facilities. Earlier in the year, another team stepped up to help a morbidly obese colorectal cancer patient who was refused treatment elsewhere because of his weight. And a 53-year-old woman who’d been repeatedly misdiagnosed at other institutions received successful treatment at City of Hope for her very unusual case of appendix cancer.

This philosophy extends beyond cancer. In 2023, City of Hope marked the 20th anniversary of its first islet cell transplant procedure to treat type 1 diabetes. Fouad R. Kandeel M.D., Ph.D., the Arthur D. Riggs Distinguished Chair in Diabetes & Metabolism Research, performed the procedure, with that patient still thriving and insulin free. Dr. Kandeel is now running several trials aimed at making transplants more durable and long-lasting, perhaps even permanent.

“Where others stop,” said Andreas Kaiser, M.D., professor and chief of the Division of Colorectal Surgery, Department of Surgery, “that’s where we get started.”