Entries - Entry Category: Hospitals and Research Facilities - Starting with A

The American Red Cross has been active in Arkansas since the second decade of the twentieth century. As an organization operated principally through volunteer labor, the Red Cross has assisted citizens of Arkansas through floods, droughts, and fires, as well as training Arkansans in emergency response and in health and safety. Three chapters of the Arkansas Red Cross serve various regions in the state of Arkansas, meeting the needs of Arkansans and disbursing help from Arkansans to meet needs all over the world. The American Red Cross was founded in Washington DC on May 21, 1881, with Clara Barton as its first director. The first Red Cross chapters founded in Arkansas began during World War I, when the number of …

The Arkansas Biosciences Institute (ABI) was created as the major research component set forth in the Tobacco Settlement Proceeds Act of 2000, passed by sixty-four percent of Arkansas voters in the general election on November 7, 2000. The primary goal of ABI is to improve the health of Arkansans through new and expanded agricultural and biomedical research initiatives, and, to that end, it operates as a partnership in health-related research with its five member institutions: Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute, Arkansas State University (ASU), the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). The Tobacco Settlement Proceeds Act of 2000 directed the State of …

Dedicated on October 4, 1959, the Arkansas Children’s Colony was a state-supported center that served Arkansas’s mentally handicapped children. The colony, set on a little over 400 donated acres in Conway (Faulkner County), provided a school and a home away from home for as many as 1,000 developmentally disabled, school age children. Governor Orval Faubus lobbied strongly for funds to build a facility to serve the state’s mentally challenged children. On January 25, 1955, the Arkansas General Assembly created Act 6, which engendered Arkansas’s first facility to serve such children. Arkansas was the forty-eighth state to open such an institution. A donation of $1,200 was made to the facility, and workers began construction in 1958. Less than two years later, …

Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH), with facilities in Little Rock (Pulaski County) and Springdale (Washington and Benton counties),is the only pediatric hospital in Arkansas and is among the ten largest children’s hospitals in the United States. Pediatric specialists routinely treat patients from other states and occasionally other countries. Prior to becoming an independent children’s hospital, ACH was an orphanage. In February 1912, Horace Gaines Pugh of Little Rock helped establish the organization that would become Arkansas Children’s Home Society. Pugh, an Illinois native, moved to Little Rock in 1896, where he worked in real estate and eventually opened his own printing house, H. G. Pugh & Company. Pugh’s early mission was to found a haven for children who were orphaned, neglected, or …

The Arkansas Health Center (AHC), located in Benton (Saline County), is a 310-bed nursing facility licensed and regulated by the Office of Long Term Care. AHC is the largest nursing home—and the only state-operated nursing facility—in Arkansas. With more than 550 employees, AHC provides nursing home care to Arkansans with special medical and behavioral needs that are not generally met through traditional nursing facilities. AHC houses specialty units to treat individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia, those with behavioral or psychiatric disorders, and those who are ventilator dependent for survival. AHC takes a holistic approach to healthcare, treating both the physical and psychiatric health concerns of the residents while also focusing on spiritual needs. Services available …

Arkansas Methodist Medical Center (AMMC) in Paragould (Greene County) provides healthcare for residents of northeast Arkansas and southeast Missouri. As of 2009, AMMC has more than eighty active and courtesy physicians from family practice to multiple specialties. A total staff of nearly 700 healthcare professionals works in a 400,000-square-foot facility. Salaries alone have an annual economic impact of more than $26 million. By the 1930s, Dickson Memorial Hospital in Paragould was past its prime. With combined support from citizens and the Paragould City Council, a donation of land by Joseph Bertig, and federal assistance from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), construction on a new hospital began in 1941. The new facility was seventy-five percent completed when the beginning of World …

The Arkansas Tuberculosis Sanatorium (also called simply the State Sanatorium) was established in 1909 about three miles south of Booneville (Logan County). Once fully established, the sanatorium was a hospital for the treatment of white Arkansans with tuberculosis. By the time the facility was closed in 1973, it treated over 70,000 patients, and in time, its main hospital, the Nyberg Building, became known worldwide for its tuberculosis treatment. With the passage of Act 378 of the Arkansas General Assembly, a board of trustees was created to oversee the search for land to build a sanatorium. This was a very vital start to create a facility that would, in fact, quarantine a highly pathogenic disease. Tuberculosis, which caused scarring of the …

The building that later became the Hot Springs Rehabilitation Center (HSRC) and then the Arkansas Career Training Institute (ACTI) began its existence as the first combined general hospital for both U.S. Army and Navy patients in the nation. The Army-Navy Hospital was created ahead of the Navy Hospital Corps and over twenty years before the founding of  the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The facility in Arkansas was quite an economic and social boon for rural Arkansas in the eyes of America and remains an imposing presence on the local skyline, regularly featured in pictures of the community. In the early 1800s, people believed that bathing in mineral waters had therapeutic value, which brought many people to the town of …