April 21, 1997
Wyoming will enter University of Washington medical school’s multi-state educational partnership
The University of Washington School of Medicine will enter into a regional medical education partnership with Wyoming, Dr. John B. Coombs, acting vice president for medical affairs and acting dean of the School of Medicine, announced today, April 21.
“This historic development greatly strengthens an already highly successful regional program of medical education involving Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho,” Coombs said. “We look forward to working with our colleagues from Wyoming on fulfilling our shared missions in physician training and in improving health-care for the people of the region.”
Washington Gov. Gary Locke cleared way for the announcement when he signed a bill April 16 to admit Wyoming students to the medical school. The Washington Legislature approved the measure April 11. After a nearly unanimous vote by the Wyoming Legislature in March of 1996, Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer enacted the enabling legislation for his state.
Coombs said this affiliation would bring Wyoming into what until now has been known as the WAMI Program, an interstate effort to train new physicians for the region. WAMI, an acronym for Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho, will change its spelling to WWAMI to include Wyoming, but will still be pronounced “whammy.”
The first WWAMI-Wyoming medical students, a class of 10, will begin medical school at the Laramie campus of the University of Wyoming Aug. 20. Opening of additional clinical teaching sites in the state will follow, as will residency training affiliations. Other services to Wyoming in support of physician training and recruitment, such as health career programs for minority and disadvantaged high school students, help for rural towns in improving their health-care services, and electronic linkages to medical school resources, through telemedicine and the information superhighway, are underway.
The UW School of Medicine established the WAMI Program 26 years ago, with Alaska as its first partner state. Idaho joined in 1972; Montana in 1974. Like Wyoming, none of these states has a medical school. The addition of Wyoming students will not affect admission rates for applicants from the other states. Wyoming is bearing the cost for its state’s participation.
Dr. Martha Williams, dean of the College of Health Sciences at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, has been active over the past several years in trying to create a WAMI-Wyoming alliance. “We are proud to join this program and to become affiliated with the other participating states in the northwest region of our country in such an exciting educational venture. The program is a model for the nation. We are pleased to be its newest partner.”
The Wyoming medical education program will be directed by Dr. Sylvia Moore. She is a clinical dietitian and medical educator on the University of Wyoming faculty. She has received many awards for her patient counseling strategies and national recognition for her approaches to teaching physicians about nutrition.
“We all are excited to be able to participate in the WWAMI medical education program,” said Moore, a professor at the University of Wyoming School of Human Medicine, from which the state’s participation in the new WWAMI program will be administered. “Our faculty and our College of Health Sciences are working hard already to assure that Wyoming medical students have a good learning environment for their first year.”
Moore also heads the Wyoming Area Health Education Center and has served on the faculty of the Family Practice Residency Program at Cheyenne. She has had major leadership responsibilities in family practice residency training in Wyoming.
Many areas of the Pacific Northwest suffer from physician shortages, as does the predominantly frontier state of Wyoming. The WWAMI model is constructed to encourage medical students to maintain close ties with their home states, to enter primary-care practices and to settle in locales lacking physicians. Medical students complete their first year of classes at a designated university in their home state. The following summer, students can volunteer for the Rural/Underserved Opportunities Program, which places them with rural or inner-city physicians in their state. All students take the second year of medical classes in Seattle. Third- and fourth-year students can take their required clinical courses, called clerkships, at training sites throughout the five-state region.
A 1974 graduate of the University of Washington medical school now in surgical practice in Rock Springs, Wyo., Dr. Tom Spicer said, “This will be a chance for our state’s practicing physicians to participate in the education of medical students and an opportunity for Wyoming physicians to be directly involved with one of the nation’s top medical schools. Community-based medical education is good for students and good for doctors, because teaching students keeps doctors up-to-date. We are also looking forward to the possibilities of collaborating on research.”
Dr. Howard Willson, a Thermopolis, Wyo., family physician, chairs the Wyoming Medical Society/University of Washington liaison committee. When asked about the significance of the new affiliation to Wyoming physicians, he replied, “How many hours do you have to hear all this? We are delighted with the high-caliber help our towns have already received from the University of Washington, such as linking physicians to computerized information networks and strengthening local health-care delivery.
“The university’s current medical students, including Lanie Smith who trained with me one summer, are wonderful ambassadors for WWAMI. Training new doctors will enable those of us already in practice to contribute to the future health care of our state. “It’s a medical education program Wyoming can call its own.”
Additional information on the Wyoming affiliation is available on the World Wide Web. To go to the site, click here
