Dierks will get a new medical facility later this month when Access Medical opens its doors in a small gray building beside a carwash on U.S. Highway 70 North.
Inside will be Nurse Practitioner Kelly Hardin, LPN Kati Brinkley and receptionist Amanda Icenhower.
Hardin practices medicine under the auspices of her collaborating provider, Dr. Clay Ferguson.
The clinic will be open 8-4:30, five days a week. Finishing touches were being put on the small office building by two workers, last week. In case the building isn’t ready by opening day — Monday, May 24 — medical services will be provided from a mobile office, NP Hardin told the newspaper last week.
Hardin, a native of Stamps, has taken a long route to this point. She earned a bachelors degree in Agri Business from SAU in Magnolia. But, she says after a few years she felt a nudge from the Almighty to make a career change. She returned to SAU to become a Registered Nurse.
That was followed by a nursing stint at Howard Memorial Hospital, and then she taught nursing on the De Queen and Nashville campuses of UA-Cossatot. She returned to the classroom at UA-Fayetteville to become a Nurse Practitioner. She finished in 2013. In the interim she has worked as an NP at clinics in Murfreesboro, De Queen and Texarkana.
She is divorced, and has two grown sons now living or studying at Fayetteville.
When not working she says she likes to hunt and fish.
Her Agri Business degree isn’t going to waste. She has a 400+ acre farm with chicken houses in Sevier County, and she will commute to work at the Dierks clinic every day.
