Jeremy Peppas

State sen. John Paul Capps and David Covey sign scrapbook pages commemorating the hospital's

SEARCY-Healthcare is booming in Searcy.

With the state’s sixth-largest hospital and with Harding University offering graduate healthcare education, Searcy isn’t a quiet little college town anymore.

The two biggest developments were Harding adding a pharmacy school program and White County Medical Center absorbing Central Arkansas Hospital, a once-rival facility on the south side of town.

The new pharmacy school will become the state’s second (after UAMS), but the process of starting a new school from scratch hasn’t been easy, according to new dean Julia Hixson-Wallace: “Basically finding the entire faculty, setting up a leadership team. Getting the accreditation and the entire process that goes along with that.”

At press time, accreditation hadn’t been accomplished, but Hixson-Wallace was hopeful it will happen soon.

“Achieving accreditation is the biggest hurdle and that’s been the focus of what we are doing so far,” she said, and then added it will definitely happen before the first class enrolls in the fall of this year. But it won’t be a big class.

“It will be 40 students in that first year,” Hixson-Wallace explained. “And then we’ll ramp it to 50 in the next year and then 60 in the third year, and that’s our target class size. We’d like to have 60 students each year. We think that’s a manageable number and by ramping it that way, we’ll be able to hire faculty as we go.”

Getting professors has also been a challenge. Harding, a Church of Christ school, likes to have faculty members that are also church members.

Harding University in Searcy has started a pharmacy school that is scheduled to start taking new students in the Fall of 2007. Pictured in the photo is the school’s new dean, Julia Hixson-Wallace, and senior pre-pharmacy students Melissa Plunk of Queen Creek, Ariz., and Jennifer Eckman of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

“So far it has gone pretty well,” Hixson-Wallace said of the professor search. “We have some already on board and some positions still open, but we do have candidates and by the end of the fifth year, we’d like to have between 27 and 30 faculty members.” The school certainly won’t suffer from a lack of students. “We’ve already received test scores from over 100 students,” Hixson-Wallace said. “We’ve gotten completed applications from over 25, but we got more in the mail today, so that’s going well.” Hixson-Wallace, who was assistant dean at Mercer’s pharmacy school in Atlanta before relocating to Arkansas, said she doesn’t view Harding as being competition to the pharmacy school at UAMS. “Nationally, the ratio is seven-to-one on applications to student slots,” she said. “So for every open spot, you had six get turned away. And at Mercer, our ratio was more like 15- or 20-to-1. So it isn’t a lack of prospective students.” Harding has also started the state’s first physician’s assistant program and already has students enrolled and taking classes.

Historically, PAs have not been prominent in Arkansas, according to the Arkansas State Medical Board, which grants their licenses to work in the state. Fewer than 100 PAs are practicing in Arkansas at this time.

But the state has also never had a training program before, so that number should climb.

White County Medical Center

Searcy once had two competing hospitals: White County Medical Center and Central Arkansas Hospital. But no more, the hospitals combined in 2006 and now have 438 licensed beds between both campuses, making it the sixth-largest hospital in the state, and bigger than the 400-bed University Hospital on the UAMS campus.

But to be fair, that is a little misleading. The beds are split between two campuses, and many hospitals in Arkansas have other facilities.

The Med in Memphis is a member of the Arkansas Hospital Association and at 620 beds, would be the second largest member of the association, bumping White County down to seventh.

But 438 is a significant number of hospital beds for Searcy and its 18,928 people.

“We have a much larger service area than just Searcy,” said hospital CEO Ray Montgomery at a function in Searcy honoring the hospital’s 40th anniversary. “We draw from all over this part of the state. White County itself is over 70,000 people, and we serve many more people for the entire six-county area.”

Congressman and physician Vic Snyder, who worked as an emergency room doctor at White County before going into politics, also spoke at the celebration.

“I spent quite a bit of time here,” Snyder, who was interrupted by a Code Blue call over the PA system, said. “It would have been 1982 and 1983,” he said, again interrupted by the Code Blue all-clear call. “It was 12-hour shifts from six p.m. to six a.m. I was here the night the tornado hit Rose Bud in 1982.

“We had four or five patients come in that night from that, and that was before they remodeled in 1983. The ER was very small then and it was very crowded.”

State Sen. John Paul Capps also spoke.

“I look at White County Medical Center and the small little part that I had in it as one of the most important things I ever did,” Capps, who had spoken at the groundbreaking ceremony in 1965, said. “It was a really big deal. It really started with about 20 young guys who really didn’t know what they were doing but thought they knew. Nobody dreamed that it would end up being what it is today. Nobody dreamed. It’s been remarkable.”


March 2007