HJAR Sep/Oct 2025

28 SEP / OCT 2025  I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS   Healthcare Briefs Arkansas Stuck Among BottomFive States for Child Well-being, Report Shows Journalist Tess Vrbin reported in the Arkansas Advocate in June that the annual Annie E. Casey Foundation report on child well-being found that Arkansas remains among the worst states for child well-being, ranking 45th nationwide for the sec- ond year in a row. The group’s 2025 KIDS COUNT Data Book mea- sures 16 indicators of child well-being in four cat- egories: education, health, economic well-being, and family and community. The report ranked Arkansas: • 36th in education • 45th in economic well-being • 46th in family and community • 47th in child health According to the Arkansas Advocate article on the KIDS COUNT report, Arkansas has con- sistently ranked in the bottom 10 states overall and in the specific categories. The state’s sta- tistics worsened for the majority of indicators in 2023, the year the data in this year’s report was collected. The report drew comparisons between 2023 and 2019, the last year before the COVID-19 pan- demic led to widespread socioeconomic impacts on families. In that time, Arkansas saw a decrease of children who live in poverty or whose parents lack secure employment, but the state’s rates of children in those situations outpaces the national rates, according to the report. In 2023, 144,000, or 21%, of Arkansas children lived in poverty, only a 1% decrease since 2019. The state also had fewer children in high-pov- erty areas with 68,000 in 2023, a 2% decrease since 2019. Other indicators remained stagnant, such as 37% of children in single-parent households and 12% of high school students not graduating on time, according to the report. In 2023, 17,000 Arkansas teens were neither working nor attending school, a 3% increase from 2019. Children and teens between the ages of 10 and 17 saw a 4% increase in obesity rates from 2019 to 2023 while the national rate remained stagnant, according to the report. Additionally, Arkansas had almost double the national rate of teen pregnancy in 2022, even after a 17% decrease since 2019. By 2023, the state’s rate had dropped from 25 to 24 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 19, according to the Casey Foundation report. The national rate is 13 births per 1,000 females. Nearly 3,400 Arkansas babies were born with low birth weights in 2023, a 0.4% increase since 2019. Arkansas also consistently has among the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality nationwide and its rate of child and teen deaths worsened from 2019 to 2023, totaling 300 per 100,000. The KIDS COUNT report also found that about half of the more than 800,000 Arkansans on Med- icaid are children. An additional 50,000 children in Arkansas, or 7%, were uninsured in 2023, a 1% increase from 2019. About 43,000 Arkansas children aged 3 and 4 were not in early childhood education pro- grams between 2019 and 2023, an increase of 6% between 2015 and 2018. Fourth-graders in Arkansas were 3% less profi- cient in reading in 2024 than in 2019, according to the report. Nationwide in 2024, “70% of fourth graders were not reading proficiently, worsening from 66% in 2019 — essentially undoing a decade of progress,” the report states. The Arkansas Advocate article this news brief was taken from was shortened for space. To read the full article, go to: https://arkansasadvocate. com/2025/06/09/arkansas-remains-45th-in-the- nation-for-child-well-being-per-national-data- assessment/ UA SystemPresident Names Barnes as UAMS InterimChancellor University of Arkansas System president Jay B. Silveria announced that C. Lowry Barnes, MD, professor and chair of the Department of Ortho- paedic Surgery at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), has been named interim chancellor of the university and began his role July 11. Barnes replaces Cam Patterson, MD, who served as chancellor and UAMS Health chief executive officer for seven years before announc- ing in June his desire to step down for personal and medical reasons. Patterson’s last day was July 10. He returned to a faculty position in cardiology at UAMS. Barnes is a fellowship-trained, board-certified orthopaedic surgeon specializing in joint recon- struction and replacement surgery of the hip and knee. He joined UAMS in 2014 as professor and chair of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. In 2017, he was invested in the Carl L. Nelson, MD, Distinguished Chair in Orthopaedic Surgery. He also serves as the director of the musculoskel- etal service line at UAMS Health. Barnes is found- ing director of the Orthopaedic and Spine Hos- pital at UAMS. After graduating with honors from the UAMS College of Medicine, Barnes remained at UAMS for his internship and residency in orthopaedic surgery. He completed an adult reconstructive surgery and arthritis surgery fellowship at Brigham & Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston. He was then selected to participate in the prestigious John N. Insall Traveling Fellowship as well as an Association for the Study of Internal Fix- ation Adult Orthopaedic Fellowship at Inselspital in Bern, Switzerland. Barnes went into practice as a joint replacement surgeon at Arkansas Specialty Orthopaedics, later becoming its president and managing partner for more than a decade. Silveria said the planning process to begin a national search to find UAMS’s next permanent leader is underway, and an advisory search com- mittee representative of UAMS campus leaders, community constituents, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Arkansas has been formed. The search committee will work with a search firm to finalize a chancellor position profile and advertising the open position. The C. Lowry Barnes, MD