Flanked by blue, white, and yellow balloons, Clark Ellison, the vice president of Mercy Health Foundation Northwest Arkansas, addressed a crowded hospital lobby.
"So with the big news," he said. "To enhance health care services, improve access to health care for Mercy, Walmart made a $5 million gift to our campaign."
Announced last week, the Walmart Foundation's gift will help Mercy Hospital Northwest Arkansas build a new cancer treatment suite and advance healthcare options for more people in Benton County.
In the lobby of Mercy's Rogers Campus, medical staff, administration, and donors from Walmart Foundation celebrated the landmark gift by getting a virtual look at the new interventional radiology suite. VR headsets showed renderings of what the new state-of-the-art suite will look like, including an angiography machine that will perform Y90 radioembolization, a minimally invasive therapy that treats liver cancer.
Dr. Jared Garrett, an interventional radiologist who will be heading up the new program said the hospital needs the machine to perform this delicate procedure.
"The liver has just branches upon branches of blood vessels," he said. "And we have to find that one that is just supplying the tumor to deliver this product."
And many of those patients require multiple treatments.
"Another tumor's going to pop up," he explained. "So now they need to come back and do it again. And we do that until they can no longer, overall, from their disease burden, handle any more treatment. But most of the time, this is to decrease that disease burden in the liver, which if we can do that, the liver tumor burden is what ultimately can cause death in a lot of the oncology patients."
Garrett said more than 60 people a year are in need of liver treatment, and many of those in the region have to travel long distances to find the proper care.
"There's nowhere for the Benton County patients that want to stay in Benton County to be treated," Garrett said. "They have to go down to Washington Regional, or if they don't have enough bedtime for them, then they would have to go to another facility that's now far away, such as UAMS in Little Rock, up to Springfield, up to Kansas City."
About half of the $5 million will go to fund this IR suite. Ryan Garrig, president of Mercy Arkansas, said the rest of the money is not yet allocated but will likely be used to expand services and meet the healthcare needs of a growing population.
"We have some ideas where the remaining dollars will go," he said. "There's not a service line at Mercy right now that's not growing rapidly, so it may be in orthopedics, cardiology, neurosurgery. There's so many needs and it will, again, it's going to go to great use to help us continue to elevate our service to the community."
Kathleen McLaughlin is president of the Walmart Foundation and said this donation to Mercy is part of her organization's legacy of investment in the hospital. Over the years Mercy has give a total of $20 million to Mercy.
"Northwest Arkansas is our home community and we've been supporting Mercy since, gosh, I think like 1993," she said. "It's a privilege for us to be part of investing in this facility that serves so many people in the region."
A 2023 survey of health care access from Forbes showed that Arkansas ranks among the sixth worst states in the nation for health care services, with only 13 primary care physicians available per 10,000 residents. And McLaughlin said access to specialty services like this are vital to the region's success and a gap that the Walmart Foundation is keen to help fill.
"We need access to the best quality medical care and this investment is going to help provide that so people can stay right here and get that care," McLaughlin said. "We all know somebody in our families or in our community, in our neighborhood that needs help, medical help, and being able to stay here and not to have to travel somewhere else to get the help that we need is really important for all of us."
Ryan Gehrig said he expects the new IR suite to be built by the spring of 2025.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The authoritative record of KUAF programming is the audio record.
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