Expansion of Arkansas Children’s Hospital designed to serve the entire state
Anyone who has done a long car trip with an infant can understand how much it means to parents like Morgan and Preston Despain of Jonesboro that now instead of traveling to Little Rock to take their 13 month old daughter, Annelise, to a specialist, instead the doctor comes to them in Jonesboro.
“It is a lot easier driving 15 minutes as opposed to six hours,” said Morgan Despain. “She is so young that it is hard spending a whole day traveling. We don’t have to travel six hours so she can see her urologist. The convenience is the number one reason it is so helpful. We are able to get quality healthcare from the Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH) right here at home.”
Despain is a school teacher, and being able to have her daughter’s appointments in Jonesboro means she can take off work a half day—or sometimes even less—rather than a whole day.
“They are very flexible about often scheduling toward the end of the day,” Despain said. “This is above and beyond what you would expect from a doctor. It is letting us know my daughter is not just a number, but a patient they care about. They are doing what is best for us, not what is best for them.”
In addition to Jonesboro, specialists at the ACH are traveling to see patients at a remote clinic in Lowell, located in Northwest Arkansas.
The ACH/UAMS Centers for Children bring pediatric subspecialty healthcare closer to families across the state for clinic visits and follow-up medical care. There are 21 subspecialty clinics in the Centers for Children located in Lowell and Jonesboro.
“This system of care is a working collaborative between the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) Department of Pediatrics and ACH,” said ACH Communications Director Dan McFadden, APR. “We're bringing the talent and experience of the ACH and UAMS teams to the Northwest and Northeast corners of the state so our patients and families can receive expert care right at home.”
There is both time and money saved on the patient’s end, said Stephen Canon, MD, a professor of pediatrics at UAMS and ACH urologist who flies to Lowell and drives to Jonesboro to see patients at the Centers for Children clinics.
“Some families have the time and money to drive to Little Rock,” Canon said. “Other families who have a hard time making ends meet may not be able to come to Little Rock, even though I know we can care for them better than an adult urologist.”
Besides being able to provide specialty care that some children wouldn’t receive otherwise, the remote clinics show a dedication to customer service that families really appreciate.
“Whenever you fly or drive to go see patients even once or twice or month, they are very flattered you have gone to that much trouble to see them,” Canon said. “There is some sacrifice. We have to reduce the number of patients we might see in a given day. Patients might not show up for appointments. But it is definitely worth it.”
Mark Winslow, vice president of ambulatory services at ACH, said for a child who lives in a small town, sometimes coming to Little Rock – the big city – can be a scary deal. The remote clinics allow them to be treated closer to home, and be back with their families the same day, or even back at school.
The services provided are specialty care. But ACH identified a lack of enough primary care providers in Northwest Arkansas, so it worked with Medicaid to add some pediatricians to that area of the state.
“What was happening is we would have kids referred here for specialty care, and they wouldn’t have a primary care provider,” Winslow said. “It was a big problem.”
ACH charters an eight- to nine-seat airplane twice a week to fly doctors, nurses, audiologists or other medical personnel that are needed for the day up to Lowell.
“We fly people representing in the neighborhood of 20 services up there,” Winslow said. “The plane is full twice a week and we are really looking at having to recruit more live-in specialists in Northwest Arkansas in the years to come. We have two pediatric neurologists in Lowell, and are in the process of trying to recruit a pediatric cardiologist.”
The staff from ACH in Little Rock drives once a week to the clinic in Jonesboro, where they have a full-time pediatric neurologist. Specialists who drive up include those in neurosurgery, genetics, infectious diseases and cardiology. There are plans to add gastrointestinal in the coming months.
Winslow said the patient’s needs must not be too advanced in nature because the clinics don’t have MRI or some of the other advanced pieces of equipment available at ACH in Little Rock. But most children can be seen.
“The parents absolutely love it,” Winslow said. “Gas prices are really high so a trip from Northwest or Northeast Arkansas to Little Rock is very expensive. Chronic illnesses can be followed up in the community, which prevents them from having to come down here. The communities of both Northwest Arkansas and Northeast Arkansas have embraced us warmly for coming up there. We have had multiple different business people come and ask how they can help us be successful.”
Winslow said it never ceases to amaze him how many people have connections to ACH; they have had a close relative or friend’s child who has been treated at ACH.
“The key is that we are doing a better job treating the kids by ACH being the children’s hospital not just for Little Rock, but the entire state,” Winslow said. “Northeast Arkansas is a highly competitive area for us and Northwest Arkansas has so many kids up there in need of care. If we hadn’t expanded up there, somebody else would have. The other piece we are really trying to get up on the ground up there is more telemedicine for both facilities.”
For more information visit:
Jonesboro: www.centersforchildren.org/Locations/Jonesboro.aspx
