With the Washington State University medical school’s inaugural class well underway on its first semester of instruction, now’s the time to start building a larger medical residency infrastructure in the Spokane area. 

Otherwise, many of those future physicians will have no choice but to go elsewhere for residencies—and if current trends hold true, they’re unlikely to return to Eastern Washington to practice. 

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) is sponsoring a bill to reauthorize federal funding for residency positions at teaching health centers nationwide, including positions at the Spokane Teaching Health Center that opened in August of 2016.

That’s a commendable and necessary step that would help to continue training for 18 doctors here, and a  strong addition to the dozens of residencies that are funded here through Medicare, the longstanding, conventional method of funding physician training.  

Dr. John Tomkowiak, dean of WSU’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, says that while federal funding is a key component of graduate medical education, expanding residency opportunities in the Spokane area will require a multipronged approach, one that’s more locally focused.

“The bottom line is, I don’t think we can let this be decided at the federal level,” he says. “If we wait for the feds to fix this, the loser is the state of Washington.”

Eastern Washington state legislators should be looking now at ways to expand residencies east of the Cascade Mountains to accommodate both WSU medical school graduates and those future physicians who receive training in Spokane through the University of Washington-Gonzaga University partnership. The state currently provides some funding for residencies for UW medical school graduates, and WSU will be looking to the state for funds for graduate medical education in the future as well. 

The two medical schools and health care providers, along with the community, could work to build a private financing mechanism for funding more residencies in the Spokane area. Such initiatives have built momentum in other cities that have recognized the importance of training doctors. 

Spokane boasts a regional health care industry that draws patients from parts of five states. It certainly has the capacity to accommodate more graduate medical education. In addition to potential at the large hospitals and physician practices, more opportunities could exist with the Mann-Grandstaff Veteran Affairs Medical Center, in northwestern Spokane.

Regardless of where they’re trained and how their funded, more residencies are needed in the Spokane area. Tomkowiak says industry statistics show that 70 percent of physicians practice within a 100-mile radius of where they train.  

The Spokane business community worked long and hard to expand medical education here for many reasons, one of which is to train more doctors here, with hopes they would practice in Eastern Washington. 

Now that more physicians are being educated here, let’s do what we can to keep them around.