January 15, 1997
New approach encourages greater community input in decisions about minority affairs efforts at UW School of Medicine.
The University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine is one of six medical schools nationwide to adopt a new decision-making model to improve opportunities for minority and disadvantaged trainees in medicine. Representatives from minority advocacy groups, clinics and hospitals serving predominantly minority populations, tribal colleges, and similar health care and higher education agencies from throughout a five-state region will help determine ways the UW medical school might meet its goals in minority medical education. Projects would be funded through a federal program, “Partnership for Health Professions Education (PHPE).”
The Division of Disadvantaged Assistance of the Bureau of Health Professions, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has awarded $1,224,974 for this three-year effort. Dr. D. Daniel Hunt, associate dean for academic affairs and director of the WAMI program of regionalized medical education, is the UW project head, along with Charlie Garcia, director of minority affairs at the medical school.
“This award recognizes remarkable gains the medical school, with the help of minority communities, has already made in fostering diversity in its medical student population and in examining minority health-care issues,” Hunt said. “This new effort will focus on the next stage, which includes encouraging disadvantaged students in high school to consider medical careers and showing them how to prepare, and achieving more diversity among our faculty and residents, and among fellows and graduate students training for research careers and academic positions.”
For example, PHPE will fund three new programs this summer for disadvantaged high school students. These programs will be in Alaska, Wyoming and the eastern Washington/northern Idaho border area.
The UW was chosen for PHPE because of its success in enlarging the local and regional pool of highly qualified minority applicants through high school outreach and an intensive summer program to help college students develop study skills and personal attributes to qualify for and succeed in medical school. The number of minority students matriculating to the UW School of Medicine has more than doubled since 1988. Sixty-nine, or almost ten percent, of the UW’s 698 medical students are members of underrepresented minority groups.
The school, which has one of the nation’s highest enrollments of Native American medical students, has also established a Center of Excellence for Native American medical education and health-care research, with a training track and a residency in Indian health. It has increased financial aid for minority and disadvantaged students, including the Turner Scholarship supported by faculty donations. It has expanded student support services, such as counseling and mentoring, which benefit all students in the medical school.
PHPE builds on the medical school’s quarter-century of success in establishing regional affiliations and collaborating with other agencies on educational programs. Projects will be carried out with these long-time regional partners.
The region the medical school serves, Washington, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, has a large migrant Hispanic population, a growing, urban African-American population, and almost 15 percent of the nation’s Native American population. The barriers these groups face in health and higher education are similar to the nation as a whole, but also unique to the nature and the geographic isolation of this vast region, according to the program summary.
The Board of Directors for the medical school’s Partnership for Health Professions Education program includes, in addition to Dr. Hunt: Dr. John B. Coombs, acting vice president for medical affairs; Dr. Philip Cleveland, clinical medical education coordinator for eastern Washington; Dr. Martha Williams, dean of health sciences at the University of Wyoming; Dr. Michael Dimino, WAMI-Alaska coordinator; Dr. Stephen Guggenheim, WAMI-Montana coordinator; Dr. Michael Laskowski, eastern Washington/Idaho WAMI coordinator; and Dr. James Blackman, clinical education coordinator-Idaho.
Other institutions receiving Partnership for Health Professions Education funding are: University of Texas at San Antonio, California Area Health Education System, University of Oklahoma, Ke Ola O Hawai’i and the New Jersey Medical School.
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