Nov. 21, 2014 | State Sen. Joyce Elliott and state Rep. Warrick Sabin got the chance Nov. 18 to see what a positive difference $80,000 in state funds and their support for the UAMS 12^th Street Health and Wellness Center is making for its patients, many of them residents of the surrounding Little Rock Promise Neighborhood.

The funds paid for remodeling and plumbing work for the installation of dental chairs, the purchase and installation of an audiology booth for full hearing examinations, improvements to the patient waiting area and additional examination tables.

The new equipment and remodeling were shown off at a news conference held at the center followed by a thank-you luncheon and tour attended by UAMS officials, students and faculty.

“I did want to be here today because this is my neighborhood,” Elliott said. “I live right down the street on Fair Park. To have this facility here gives so much to the neighborhood and to the people who have stayed and not left it.”

Elliott and Sabin along with state Reps. Frederick Love and Charles Armstrong and the Central Arkansas Planning and Development District helped direct state General Improvement Funds to the center during the 89^th General Assembly of the Legislature.

“It’s great that UAMS is not just saying ‘Come across the Interstate 630 to us.’ The commitment that UAMS has made to be in the neighborhood is really important to us. Obviously, I should do no less than to support this center,” Elliott said.

UAMS Chancellor Dan Rahn, M.D., and other university officials unveiled a plaque expressing the university’s gratitude to Elliott, Sabin, Love, Armstrong and the planning district. The Little Rock Promise Neighborhood, which the center serves, is in Sabin’s legislative district.

The UAMS 12^th Street Health and Wellness Center opened in early 2013 as a community-based, student-led, interprofessional health and wellness center that provides free health screenings and health management services for people in the neighborhood and surrounding areas. The center includes services by students and faculty across the UAMS colleges of Health Professions, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Public Health and the Graduate School.

Arkansas needs more facilities statewide that provide services like the 12^th Street center, Sabin said. The preventive care and the other services are an efficient way of helping patients avoid more expensive emergency care.

“We’ve seen so much improvement to this area because the community has gotten involved with investments at the state, county and city levels,” Sabin said. “When you have so many working together and cooperating to leverage those investments, then that’s a good thing. I’m happy to see this center in the corridor.”

Both Rahn and the center’s director Lanita White, Pharm. D., thanked the legislators for their help and interest in the center’s mission as well as the volunteers who staff it.

“It’s a great learning environment for our students and the neighborhood’s families,” Rahn said. “About 40 students a week work here, some of it for credit, but most of it on a purely volunteer basis. They are learning about the health challenges of the neighborhood’s patient population as well as providing services under the mentorship of faculty to meet those health needs.”