Nika Bartoo-Smith
Underscore Native News + ICT
Earlier this month, the University of Washington School of Medicine Student Education Program announced the largest scholarship gift the school has received.
The donation, $25 million, will be used to create a scholarship to increase primary-care physicians that serve Indigenous and rural communities across the school’s five-state service region — Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho, known to the school as the WWAMI region.
“I think even the doctors who like me aren’t going to be receiving this fund, we ultimately appreciate that we’re going to have more colleagues supporting an important cause to all of us, which is preventative medicine and caring for these special, rural Indigenous communities,” said Ty Running Fisher, a citizen of the Blackfeet Nation and a descendant of the Quinault Indian Nation, a fourth year student at the UW School of Medicine. “I just really, really appreciate the incentive of the scholarship.”
The donation came from William (Bill) and Carolyn Franke and their family. The money will create the Franke Medical Student Scholars Program.
“Living part time in Montana, we have seen firsthand that the physician shortage in many rural communities persists today and we saw an opportunity to help address this challenge,” said Bill Franke, co-founder and managing partner of Indigo Partners, in a press release.
$20 million of the scholarship fund will cover half of school tuition for around 30 students, according to a press release. The selected students must demonstrate a financial need and a commitment to practicing medicine in Indigenous or rural communities.
$4.5 million will establish the Franke Family Endowed Fund for Excellence that will go toward student recruitment, retention and support for graduates who practice medicine in rural communities across the region post graduation.
The remaining $500,00 will go toward the W.A. Franke Rural Medical Education Summit that will bring together students, alumni and faculty from across the 18 member institutions of the Big Ten Conference to talk about ideas for rural medical education.
“The reason this is such an amazing gift is that, again, this is the largest gift we’ve ever received to our WWAMI Medical Student Education Program,” said Dr. Tim Dellit, CEO of UW Medicine and dean of the UW School of Medicine. “We believe it’s the largest gift in the country that’s ever been given to help support rural and Indigenous communities.”
With six campuses across five states, the WWAMI region, the UW School of Medicine works with 280 new students each year. Students spend the first 18 months at one of the six campuses and their clinical training, during third and fourth year, anywhere across the five states.
“Most of these states have significant shortages of healthcare practitioners, especially physicians. As an example, Idaho has the lowest number of physicians per capita of any state in the country,” Dellit said. “So, our WWAMI program was created over 50 years ago, really with the goal to improve access to care for our rural communities and increase the number of physicians going into primary care.”
As a fourth year in the program, currently doing clinical training in Montana, Running Fisher said that one of his biggest takeaways has been seeing the huge amount of wait time many people in rural and Indigenous communities have just to see a primary care physician — sometimes with appointments being six months out.
“It’s so important to have more primary care and accessibility to preventative health, because not only are rural communities affected with more health disparities, but specifically the Indigenous communities have even worse health disparities that are primarily [preventable],” Running Fisher said.
Being in a program that incentivises serving in Indigenous and rural communities, now even more so with the new scholarship, Running Fisher has seen first hand how it has impacted his classmates who may not have considered practicing healthcare in rural communities before.
It has also sparked some of his own passion for serving rural communities.
Post graduation, Running Fisher hopes to go back home to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and provide care for his community.
“I think something that was highlighted the most to me was the lifestyle of these providers and just the really profound patient connections a lot of the providers get to see,” Running Fisher said, giving the example of a doctor who may get to help multiple generations of people from the same family give birth. “It just really showed how personalized medicine can be, and how much more of an impact you can make when you do have connection to a community.”
This story is co-published by Underscore Native News and ICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest.
