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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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In Our View: Acute Need For Doctors

That fact gets lost amid UW-WSU turf war over proposed medical school

The Columbian
Published:

Let us start with finding common ground. That’s the proper way to diffuse a rumble over a particular piece of turf, isn’t it?

So, with Washington State University granting approval for the creation of a new medical school in Spokane, and with the University of Washington scoffing at the idea, let us find that common ground: The state is in dire need of expanded medical school facilities. According to a study commissioned by WSU, a total of 17 counties in the state have fewer than 10 doctors per 10,000 people, while the national average is about 27 physicians for that amount of population.

There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? We’re reasonably certain the state’s education officials can agree on a need for more doctors, yet the WSU study has raised the hackles of its cross-state rival. The Cougars and the Huskies started talking about medical schools, and an Apple Cup football game broke out. You see, UW officials looked at the study and declared that it contained “faulty assumptions, omissions and erroneous data,” adding that “These flaws raise significant concerns about the actual feasibility of a WSU medical school.”

UW officials might be correct; WSU officials might be correct. But for the state to move forward and prepare for the future, it will be crucial for that common ground to remain the focal point. Outside of the state’s metropolitan areas, there is a shortage of doctors that threatens to be exacerbated by an aging and growing population, an aging roster of physicians, and increased demand for health care as more people acquire insurance. For rural areas — especially those east of the Cascades — the shortage is particularly acute. That is where the University of Washington comes in. UW has the only public medical school in the state, and it runs a five-state consortium called WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho) to train and provide doctors for those mostly rural states.

It is understandable that UW would take a proprietary view of medical training in the state, yet who trains their doctors is of secondary concern to residents. Of primary importance is whether a doctor is available and whether a patient can make an appointment when they need one. The UW School of Medicine annually admits 120 students from the state, while the WSU study suggests that states of similar size have 400 openings each year. According to Spokane-based doctors Henry Mroch and Jeremy Graham, writing for The Seattle Times, “Every year, about 250 promising, highly qualified students leave Washington, permanently in many cases, to attend medical school elsewhere.”

WSU’s proposed school would take advantage of the university’s new $80 million biomedical and health sciences building in Spokane, eliminating many of the startup costs. According to Lisa Brown, a WSU chancellor, the school would require $2.5 million from the Legislature over the first two years; when it is fully operational about a decade from now, it would need $24 million a year in state funding.

That spills the rumble into the chambers of the Legislature, where lawmakers already are grappling with dire funding needs for K-12 education, mental health care and transportation. In other words, it’s not as though the Legislature has a bunch of blank checks waiting to be handed out. But adequate health care helps define a state’s quality of life, and ensuring such care is important to the future of Washington.

In the end, who wins the med school turf war won’t much matter to residents. All that will matter is that the gangs arrive on common ground.

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