The UW-Gonzaga health partnership, UW School of Medicines Eastern Washington program, had been hoping for its own building since its establishment in 2016.

Right after we launched our partnership with them, we increased our class size by 20 students, Kim Blakeley, the UW Medicine director of communications for medical education, said. We were pretty packed.

The new medical education, health sciences, and innovation building which broke ground last week in Spokane will be the future home of 120 first- and second-year medical students, 30 to 35 MEDEX Northwest physician assistant (PA) program students, 225 human physiology students, and over 300 nursing and undergraduate health science students.

According to Blakeley, integrating so many disciplines of health science into one building allows for interprofessional proximity that encourages training across specialties.

It will give our medical students the opportunity to work more closely with nursing students, with PA students, Blakeley said. Theres also undergraduate health science students taking courses in the facility. It may interest a number of students in pursuing a career in medicine.

Previously, medical students had been renting the anatomy lab from Washington State University in Spokane. The upcoming four-story building will feature classrooms and labs, research space, administrative offices, and solar energy generation. It will also house a new anatomy lab to call its own.

The building is being built and managed by McKinstry, with UW Medicine and Gonzaga as the anchor tenants. McKinstry owns the Spokane & Inland Empire Railroad (SIERR) building next door, historically an electric streetcar repair station, which will be included in the new medical education hub and house MEDEX Northwest student classrooms.

The entire fourth floor of the new building will likely be dedicated to research and, according to Blakeley, other private industries related to health, wellness, and medicine.

Dedicating a 90,000-square foot building to health science education in Spokane reflects UW Medicines commitment to training physicians to practice in rural areas. Each of the WWAMI states (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho) have UW Medicine campuses partnered with a local university that train residents and coordinate clerkship rotations among all five states once students reach their third year.

When they graduate, they all have UW School of Medicine diplomas, and the curriculum is the same throughout the region, Blakeley said. The opportunity to travel around, its a really unique system.

The interest in rural medicine appears to be increasing among new generations of medical schools. According to Blakeley, when UW Medicine first began in Pullman nearly 50 years ago, students who intended to attend the Seattle campus would say they had been WWAMI-ed to Spokane when the school placed them there instead.

Now that has flipped around, Blakeley said. All of the students in Spokane now are students who choose to be there.

Blakeley cites that over 50% of the graduates in Spokane remain in Eastern Washington to practice. Establishing more opportunities for residency in non-urban areas is the challenge of retaining physicians, since the location of residency is a major predictor of where someone will practice.

In rural areas, the physician work force is not adequate, Blakeley said. Thats the reason WWAMI was started in the first place: to train a physician workforce for the five-state region that struggles to get physicians to work in these small towns.

UW-Gonzaga hopes the new building set to open in August 2022 will expand the medical program from its current capacity of 60 per cohort to 80.

Reach reporter Theresa Li at news@dailyuw.comTwitter: @lithere_sa

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Construction begins on new UW Medicine teaching facility in Spokane - Dailyuw