Board's 8-0 vote rezones land for clinic

Children’s Hospital says southwest LR’s Hispanics need care closer to home

A map showing the location of the proposed Arkansas Children’s Hospital clinic.
A map showing the location of the proposed Arkansas Children’s Hospital clinic.

Arkansas Children's Hospital's plan to open a family care clinic in southwest Little Rock moved forward Tuesday night when the city Board of Directors approved a rezoning request.

The one-story, 11,555-square-foot clinic is to open on Dailey Drive off Baseline Road in June.

Rob Steele, the hospital's senior vice president and chief strategy officer, said his employees noticed that many of Spanish-speaking families were traveling to the hospital's west Little Rock clinic for care even though they didn't live in that area.

The west Little Rock clinic's bilingual staff will move into the southwest Little Rock clinic once it's constructed, and the west Little Rock office will likely shift to specialty care, Steele said.

"Part of our statewide network of care ... is to bring care closer to home," Steele said of the new clinic.

The Board of Directors voted 8-0 to approve the rezoning request with two board members absent. The property was rezoned from residential to planned office development.

The city owns the land where the clinic is planned. It has proposed a 99-year lease with the hospital. It's a similar agreement to the one the city entered into with the county in 2012 when the county built the nearby Southwest Health Unit on city property.

"This is a great partnership with the city and the Children's Hospital," Mayor Mark Stodola said Tuesday. "We're really developing a sort of medical complex here, which is going to be really great for the residents."

The primary care clinic is scheduled to be open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. It is to have 15 rooms, a lab and an X-ray unit.

Steele said the location is ideal, with residential areas, a community center, police substation and the county's health clinic nearby. The main reason to build the clinic in the area, though, is to serve the Hispanic population, Steele said.

According to the 2010 census, there were 32,376 people living in the 72209 zip code where the clinic will be located. About 18 percent identified as Hispanic, mostly Mexican. The adjacent 72204 and 72210 zip codes were each 7 percent Hispanic.

"We are very excited. We think we can serve children of Little Rock, and particularly southwest Little Rock, so much better with this facility," Steele said.

He told board members that the hospital anticipates that a lease with the city will be worked out and approved by the board by next month, and that construction will take seven or eight months. The original thought was that the clinic could open in May, but now the timeline shows a June opening.

The clinic "is so important to the children of southwest Little Rock," City Director at large Joan Adcock said.

Metro on 08/17/2016

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