With all of the news in the media lately about medical education in Spokane and two of our major health sciences programs exploring the expansion of their medical education programs, we’ve been asked where we stand. We support both, and recently advocated for each of the projects in Olympia.
GSI fully supports the expansion of medical education in our region and believes in the vision of creating a comprehensive, world-class, academic health sciences medical education and research center in our community. GSI supports both Washington State University Spokane and the University of Washington in their visions to support medical education and graduate medical education, and will continue to do so.
Both schools, and GSI, collectively agree that we need to grow medical education beyond the level it is today in order to meet the state’s growing physician shortage. Also of interest is the need for improved healthcare access in Eastern Washington, particularly primary care physicians in rural and underserved areas. We agree on the critical importance of growing research and enhancing bioscience economic development, and anticipate that the pursuit of the schools’ objectives will also lead to commitments to bring additional investment in research, development and commercialization of medical technologies to our community.
