UAMS 12th Street Center Celebrates 10th Anniversary with Fall Festival
| About 200 people – families, students and volunteers – turned out Oct. 7 for the Fall Festival at the UAMS 12th Street Health & Wellness Center, which also served as a celebration of the center’s 10th anniversary.
“There was a moment when I was standing outside looking at our sign, looking at our students interacting with the kids and community members, and it took me aback for a minute. I thought, ‘This is why we are here. This is our whole purpose,’” said Melissa Halverson, Pharm.D., MPH, director of the 12th Street Center and an associate professor in the UAMS College of Health Professions Department of Physician Assistant Studies.
UAMS students and volunteers were on hand to answer health questions from festival attendees.
Located just south of UAMS’ main campus, the community-based, student-led, interprofessional clinic provides free health screenings and health management services for people in the community. A primary mission of the center is to provide public health education to the public, especially those in the nearby, underserved neighborhood.
During the bright, autumn Saturday afternoon, volunteers at tables and booths provided information about the UAMS Culinary Medicine program, general literacy as well as the center’s various specialty events and clinics for men’s health, women’s health, mental health, LGBTQ+ health, and muscular/orthopaedics.
Festival attendees also snacked on popcorn and cotton candy as they visited the booths, while children enjoyed crafts, carnival games and a bounce house.
Students from UAMS’ five colleges and graduate school staff the free clinic, which opened in January 2013. Since then, the center has provided medical care to more than 7,000 patients who might otherwise not be able to afford necessary care. In 2022 alone, the center treated 800 individual patients and logged more than 59,000 volunteer hours from hundreds of students.
“My hope is that the center has increased the health of the general community,” said student Nadia Safar. “We see many patients who live in the area or nearby areas who otherwise wouldn’t have any access to health care. We are able to give them primary care and access to their medications for things like diabetes and high blood pressure.”
Safar is a fourth-year student in the UAMS College of Medicine. Along with other volunteers and students, she and Brittany Tian, a third-year UAMS medical student, helped organize the festival. Safar is executive director of the center’s Student Board of Directors, and Tian is the board’s deputy director.
Brittany Tian, left, and Nadia Safar, right, stand in front of the bounce house at the festival and get ready to offer cookies to some of the volunteers at the celebration.
Like Safar and Tian, Halverson in October 2013 also started at the center as a student volunteer. She was a UAMS College of Pharmacy student and working on a project for her master’s degree in public health. She’s never left and has witnessed many changes over the decade since.
“I don’t how or why I did that, except that I loved it so much,” Halverson said. “I would finish my clinical rotation and then come back to the center in the evenings, and I loved it. When I was about to graduate, I was going to move and be a pharmacist in Atlanta. Then I found out they were going to do a residency at the center, and I changed my plans.”
She applied and got it. Degrees in hand and later hired at UAMS on the main campus, Halverson said she worked as a preceptor at the center. She next served as assistant director of the center.
“I joke that if you stay around long enough, then they will put you in charge. When Dr. Lanita White left, that’s exactly what happened in 2019. They offered me the director position,” Halverson said. White was the founding director of the clinic.
In all those roles and during her 10 years there, Halverson witnessed the 12th Street Center’s evolution from a place envisioned for training students and providing public health education to the community to an important provider of health care to residents of an area of Little Rock without access to affordable care.
Halverson said as part of efforts to educate patients about diabetes and high-blood pressure management, the center started doing screenings. Frequent high readings led to prescribing medications and adding laboratory testing and services. Now, the center offers women’s health services, immunizations for children, a musculoskeletal night, men’s health services and a Rainbow Clinic for LGBTQ+ patients.
A $195,655 grant from the Methodist Foundation for Arkansas enabled the center to purchase new ultrasound equipment, and a new X-ray machine is expected to arrive next month.
“Everything we have expanded into has been because of a need we have seen and because our students have a passion to fill those needs for patients,” Halverson said.
The center has built a record of service. Because it finds new ways to do more for its patients, Halverson and the center’s patients have kept coming back for the last decade. That is the achievement everyone was celebrating at the festival.
Firefighters from the Little Rock Fire Department take a break in volunteering to briefly engage in a cornhole toss competition.