The five-year-old women’s health center affiliated with New York-Presbyterian Hospital is planning to expand its current space to accommodate additional patients and services, hospital officials said yesterday.

“We are looking into an expansion of the program,” the hospital’s president and chief executive, Herbert Pardes, said at the annual press luncheon of the Iris Cantor Women’s Health Center.

Hospital officials said they are adding some 4,000 square feet —roughly one floor of space — to the existing Iris Cantor center, which is spread out over four floors in a building on East 61st Street that houses other medical offices affiliated with Weill Cornell Medical College. Officials said they expect construction to be completed by July 1. It was not immediately clear last night how much the expansion would cost, but officials said eight additional doctors and surgeons will join its current roster of 25 full-time physicians. One of them will be a well-known authority on breast cancer, Anne Moore, an oncologist at the hospital who will move her practice to the Iris Cantor center.

In addition to seeing patients, Dr. Moore will spearhead a new breast cancer survivor program, which will study and treat young survivors of breast cancer.

Doctors at the health center said the expansion is necessary, in part, to accommodate a practice that is outgrowing its space. “Also, in the continuing desire to provide more care to patients and to broaden the types of services we deliver, the expansion gave us that opportunity,” the center’s founder and director, Orli Etingin, said.

According to Dr. Etingin, the field of women’s health is still a new one, and the impact of the center’s expansion could reverberate throughout the field in the long term. “Fifteen years ago, there wasn’t practically a single women’s health center in the country, so the whole concept is relatively new,” she said.

In New York City, she said, the Iris Cantor center is the only health center to offer comprehensive health care designed specifically for women. Currently, the center treats nearly 45,000 patients each year, hospital officials said yesterday.

Supported by funding from the philanthropist Iris Cantor, the health center opened in April 2002. Although doctors see some male patients, the center was designed to offer comprehensive health care to female patients. In addition to internists, the center employs specialists in all areas of women’s health with an emphasis on breast cancer, osteoporosis, and menopause.

Its facilities include on-site mammography, nutritional counseling, physical therapy, and women’s health education. Officials said clinicians will expand their services in the areas of obstetrics and gynecology, breast cancer, and oncology.

“We have been able to better treat patients by consolidating their care,” Dr. Etingin said. “I think we’ve had an extraordinary opportunity to advance the field of women’s health.”

News of the expansion comes during a period of marked renovation and construction for the hospital and its affiliated medical schools, including the addition of another floor of hospital beds at the Greenberg Pavilion. Recently, Weill Cornell Medical College opened a new 13-story ambulatory care and medical education building on York Avenue at 70th Street. The medical school also has announced plans to construct a $650 million biomedical research building, and construction is set to begin this year on a mixed-use building on First Avenue between 71st and 72nd streets that will house medical offices.