The Community Clinic's dream of opening a Fayetteville storefront soon will become a reality thanks to a $585,000 grant from the Endeavor Foundation.
"We are continually amazed at what they do and the numbers of people they are able to help," said Anita Scism, the foundation's president and CEO. "We feel that is an area that needs services"
Community Clinic
Community Clinic is a Federally Qualified Health Center with 12 locations in Northwest Arkansas. It addresses needs of the community with medical clinics in Springdale, Rogers and Siloam Springs; dental clinics in Springdale and Rogers; and school-based health centers in Springdale, Fayetteville, Prairie Grove, Lincoln and Siloam Springs. Services include preventive care, chronic disease management, prenatal care, women’s health, pediatric services and dental care. It offers a sliding fee discout to patients who qualify based on income.
Source: Staff report
The clinic will open on Martin Luther King Boulevard, west of Interstate 49, in a strip center across the street from Lowe's.
Kathy Grisham, Community Clinic executive director, hopes to open in August with 12 exam rooms, a lab and a behavioral health office. Practitioners can see up to 6,200 patients annually at the site.
The future of a new Fayetteville clinic was in question after legislators passed a state budget April 1 cutting nearly $600,000 from the Northwest Arkansas nonprofit clinic.
Grisham said the Endeavor grant is for the bricks-and-mortar project and the lost state money supported operations. The state cut is about 3 percent of Community Clinic's total budget, and board members are discussing ways to to fill the gap, she said.
Community Clinic saw 31,000 patients last year at clinics in Springdale, Rogers and Siloam Springs and seven school-based sites across the area. The south Fayetteville site will help the clinic meet the needs of the 3,000 area children on Medicaid, Grisham said.
"Our mission is to serve any under-served population or location," she said. "About 90 percent of our patients are at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level."
The Endeavor Foundation also announced Wednesday it awarded a $411,000 planning grant to Mercy Clinic Northwest Arkansas to develop a holistic regional approach to address the physical and mental health and basic needs of the region's school-aged children.
Scism said about 23 percent of Northwest Arkansas children live below the poverty threshold and more than half the region's homeless population is under age 18. Ongoing meetings with area school superintendents pointed to the need of addressing the problem, she said.
"It kept coming up over and over. They are not able to teach children because of all the problems children are coming to school with," Scism said. "Maybe there is some central approach that can be developed for the schools so they don't have to do it by themselves."
Nick Ogle, program director of behavioral health at Mercy Northwest Arkansas, was involved with school leaders early on when developing the idea for a regional study. He began work at Mercy in December, and the medical system will spearhead the research.
Mercy will hire a research team consisting of five full-time people and eight graduate assistants who will collect more than 200,000 pieces of data from the 76 schools within the area's five largest school districts.
"I don't know what the solution is going to be, but I think we will look at every solution imaginable," he said.
Kathy Launder, nurse supervisor for the Springdale School District, said it's important to look at the whole child, starting with the physical needs and working up to their clothing and mental health needs.
"We have a lot of child hunger," she said. "I think mental health is hugely ignored."
Launder likes the idea of a regional plan and said the area's 175 school nurses already share ideas of what is working in various districts.
"It's like a big snowball, and it keeps growing," she said of childhood poverty. "We have to attack it one thing at a time."
Ogle agreed that the problem will have to be fixed in pieces and will likely take some type of policy reform.
"Having these five superintendents out there saying 'Yes, we want help,' makes this possible," he said. "I think we can really develop change."
Scism said she hopes the first steps can be implemented in the 2016-17 school year.
"It's exciting to think about what could be," she said. "This is a planning grant that could really change the community."
Christie Swanson can be reached by email at cswanson@nwadg.com or on Twitter @NWAChristie.
A Section on 04/23/2015