UAMS Receives $1.5 Million Gift From Walker Charitable Foundation

The Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation has gifted the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) Northwest campus with $1.5 million.

The money will aid in the construction of the Student Clinical Education Center. The 8,000-square-foot space will include the Clinical Skills Center, where students will work with volunteers – known as standardized patients – who simulate an illness. Also in the center will be the Student Continuity Clinic, where supervised students will follow real patients in an actual clinic setting throughout their training at UAMS.

“The Walker Foundation has shown time and again its support for UAMS and for efforts to improve health in Arkansas,” said UAMS Chancellor Dan Rahn, M.D. “The growing UAMS Northwest campus will play an increasingly important role in the years ahead in our ability to produce more health care professionals to meet the already high demand for care in our state.”

The center is expected to open in early 2013 following renovations to add clinical training rooms, conference space and a nurses’ station, as well as provide the required technology and audio-visual components.

The Walker family’s support of UAMS now totals more than $48 million, including gifts made to the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute.

Other support has included gifts that funded the Pat Walker Tower of the UAMS Jones Eye Institute, the Walker Family Clinic in the UAMS Psychiatric Research Institute, the Pat and Willard Walker Memory Research Center in the UAMS Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging and the Carl L. Nelson, M.D. Orthopaedic Center.