A University of Washington medical school program that serves five western states, including Alaska, recently received a $25 million endowment for scholarships to increase the number of physicians in rural and Indigenous communities.
The WWAMI program gets its name from the five states it serves — Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho — and educates emerging physicians in those rural states. Philanthropists William and Carolyn Franke and their family gave the WWAMI program the $25 million endowment to create the Franke Medical Student Scholars Program. Along with scholarships, the money is aimed at providing student support and educational programming for medical school students “committed to serving rural and Native communities in the five states,” according to a statement from the University of Washington.
The endowment will provide scholarships to cover half of the tuition for 30 eligible students across the five states, said Nick Phelps, WWAMI’s assistant dean at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Scholarships like this “are going to become that much more important for us to be able to continue to provide the level of education that we can, and also for us to be able to continue to recruit students to be able to continue serving Alaska," Phelps said.
That's partly due to caps the U.S. Department of Education will soon be putting on student loans used to pay for higher education, including medical school.
Those eligible to apply for the scholarships are students in two specific programs, Phelps said.
One is a dedicated track for physicians to serve rural areas, and the other is a track for physicians pursuing the so-called “Indian Health Pathway,” in which medical students focus on tribal healthcare and get training on traditional medicine. The New England Journal of Medicine recently highlighted that pathway as a case study in advancing Indigenous health equity in medical school curricula.
Medical school tuition and the debt students take on to pay it can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the new scholarships change what can be a difficult financial decision for some students, Phelps said.
"Primary care practices and primary care physicians are the bedrock of medicine, for lack of a better term," he said. "They're also some of the lowest-paid specialties for students to go into, so for somebody who really is strongly interested in family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine, some of those other primary care specialties, they have to do a bit of an internal calculus."
Many medical students choose specialties that pay better, which has contributed to a shortage of primary care practitioners, both in Alaska and across the U.S.
Phelps said he hopes that the scholarships encourage more Alaska students to focus on medicine that serves rural, remote and Indigenous Alaskans.
"Alaska needs physicians," he said. "We want to make sure that these trained, qualified physicians are encouraged to come back and practice and serve the communities from which they came."
