INSPIRING HOPE
Southwest Little Rock Community Clinic Brings Primary Care to Kids BY CHARLOTTE LOBUONO
Above: Southwest Little Rock Community Center
CHILDREN IN Southwest Little Rock, Arkansas, can now have their primary care needs met right in their own neighborhood. The goal of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH) Southwest Little Rock Community Clinic is to bring care closer to home, according to Ann Kruger, who is a registered nurse and vice president of primary care and behavioral health for ACH in Little Rock. “We relocated our pediatric clinic from Top: Ann Kruger, RN, MBA; Bottom: Eduardo R. Ochoa, west Little Rock in part because Jr., MD, FAAP we found a large number of our families were coming from southwest Little Rock and traveling up to 16 miles for their care,” she says.
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The ACH Southwest Little Rock Community Clinic is the first primary care clinic built from scratch that is not located on Arkansas Children’s main campus, says Dr. Eduardo Ochoa, medical director of the clinic. Ochoa says the facility was placed in a community-based setting, rather than a strip mall, for example, to keep the local population in mind. When the project first started, few properties were found in southwest Little Rock that were appropriate, Ochoa says. About four or five months into the project, the decision was made to build a new clinic from the ground up. Around that time, the city manager and two legislators—state Sen. Joyce Elliott and state Rep. Fredrick Love—asked the hospital to consider land behind the Pulaski Southwest Health Unit, where the clinic is today. As it turned out, this land belonged to the city of Little Rock.
