{"id":33443,"date":"2025-04-07T09:32:53","date_gmt":"2025-04-07T16:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/?p=33443"},"modified":"2025-04-24T12:15:01","modified_gmt":"2025-04-24T19:15:01","slug":"history-behind-wsu-medical-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/2025\/04\/07\/history-behind-wsu-medical-school\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWhite Coats, Crimson Spirit\u201d: The Unlikely History Behind the Creation of WSU\u2019s Medical School"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Washington State University Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine is celebrating 10 years of training homegrown health care providers<\/a> to improve access to care in Washington communities. However, the story of the college began long before WSU broke ties with WWAMI to create an independent medical school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until 2015, a nearly century-old state law gave the University of Washington the exclusive right to confer medical degrees in Washington state. For decades, WSU trained medical students through WWAMI, a UW medical education program that includes agreements with universities in Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho, giving the program its name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WSU\u2019s discontent with WWAMI boiled over into public view in the early 2010s, when university leadership argued UW wasn\u2019t providing enough seats for medical education in eastern Washington despite a critical need for more doctors in the region. At the time, UW admitted 120 medical students per year and turned away hundreds more, with just 20 seats allocated to a pilot program to train more medical students at WSU Spokane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor probably 30 years there\u2019ve been a lot of people working in Eastern Washington to try to bring more medical education to this side of the state, and we need it,\u201d the chief medical officer of the Providence health care system in Spokane told The Spokesman-Review <\/em>in 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the pilot program saw disappointing enrollment, WSU officials faulted UW\u2019s lackluster recruitment effort and began to float the idea of an independent medical school in Spokane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe want UW as a partner with us, but if they won’t, this is important enough to us that we\u2019re going to have to plow our own way,\u201d then-WSU President Elson S. Floyd told The Spokesman-Review<\/em> in 2013.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

UW leadership at the time wasn\u2019t convinced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGood luck. That\u2019s a multimillion-dollar task,\u201d then-UW President Michael Young said, according to the newspaper, adding that Floyd\u2019s comments reflected \u201cnot understanding how a medical school is run.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WSU moved quickly to prove Young wrong. Having already invested $80 million in the new Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences Building at the Spokane campus, in 2014 the WSU Board of Regents concluded WSU was well-positioned to create its own medical school. The universities announced they were mutually dissolving their WWAMI agreement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WSU leadership then turned their focus on the next obstacle: the 1917 state law that prevented the university from issuing medical degrees. Extensive advocacy by Floyd and other officials bore fruit when  then-Governor Jay Inslee signed into law a bipartisan bill that gave WSU the authority to create an independently accredited medical school in April 2015.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WSU\u2019s College of Medical Sciences was renamed the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine later that year, following Floyd\u2019s passing. The college then began the herculean task of building a medical school from the ground up, hiring faculty and staff and forging dozens of partnerships with clinical affiliates across the state. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike most medical schools, which are centered on a university-owned teaching hospital, the WSU College of Medicine is a community-based medical school, following a more cost-effective model where students train in existing hospitals and clinics, gaining hands-on experience in the settings where they may one day practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under the leadership of Founding Dean Dr. John Tomkowiak, the WSU College of Medicine achieved preliminary accreditation for its MD program in 2016, an effort supported by more than 100 faculty and staff. The program welcomed its first class of 60 medical students in 2017, just two years after its founding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are going to exceed expectations at every opportunity,\u201d Dean Tomkowiak told The Spokesman-Review.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, WSU has graduated 248 medical doctors, now welcoming 80 students each year. They are joined by their peers in the departments of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology and Speech and Hearing Sciences, creating an interprofessional learning environment to train providers who will one day improve access to care in Washington communities.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\tRead More About the College's 10-Year Anniversary\t\t\t<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A century-old law and more than one skeptic were barriers to the creation of the college. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25158,"featured_media":33444,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[106,107,32,53],"wsuwp_university_location":[],"wsuwp_university_org":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33443"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25158"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33443"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33446,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33443\/revisions\/33446"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33443"},{"taxonomy":"wsuwp_university_location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wsuwp_university_location?post=33443"},{"taxonomy":"wsuwp_university_org","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.wsu.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wsuwp_university_org?post=33443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}