Inslee: Thumbs up to medical residency program

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said he’s happy with what the Pullman Regional Hospital’s Family Medicine Residency Program is doing.

The governor visited Whitman County on Thursday, stopping by Pullman on a trip to meet with health care experts at the local hospital. Inslee also dropped by the Community Action Center in Pullman to discuss housing and food assistance with local service providers. The governor finished his visit at the Washington State University Bear Center, where he was met by brown bears and grizzlies.

Staff at Pullman Regional Hospital warmly met Inslee at the facility’s doors, and took him on a tour of the institution. They stopped at the hospital’s new Family Medicine Residency Center, and told Inslee its plans for health care in rural Washington.

The hospital opened the Family Medicine Residency Center to patients in February, staffed with two local family medicine providers to see patients in preparation for residents arriving this summer. Providers will oversee three residents, who plan to begin their next education steps at the program in July.

The Family Medical Residency program is a partnership between Pullman Regional Hospital and Washington State University’s Elton S. Floyd College of Medicine, according to Stephen Hall, the program director. The hospital will teach the next generation of rural doctors, as the program provides medical school graduates with their last three years of training before they receive a license to practice medicine.

Inslee said programs like these are important to Washington, as the state needs more rural doctors to keep up with growing demands. He added nationally rural areas suffer from primary care provider shortages.

To draw awareness to this, the governor recently proclaimed May 2023 as Nurses Month in Washington state. Inslee also signed a bill to ensure safe staffing levels in health care facilities and another bill to reduce barriers to the nursing profession.

Jade Stellmon, program administrator, said the need for health care in rural communities is growing, especially in Eastern Washington, which has fewer physicians per capita than the last ranked state in that statistic, Idaho. She added over the next few decades, Washington will need a 20% increase, or 180,400 additional physicians, for rural and underserved Americans for them to have the same access to health care as the rest of the nation.

The program plans to have trained 500 residents by 2035, hoping that some of the residents will stay and practice medicine in Washington. Stellmon said around 56% of trainees will stay in the state, which would be a “win” for Washington and its need for rural providers.

Inslee said he’s impressed by the idea that by training physicians in rural hospitals they’ll like to stay in rural Washington towns. He joked that doctors who come to Washington for residency aren’t allowed to leave the state when they finish their education.

As well as dropping by the hospital, Inslee visited the Community Action Center of Pullman. The center is a social service hub for Whitman County, offering food services, housing vouchers and additional aid to low-income residents.

Inslee toured the center’s hydroponics garden, and talked with the center’s operators about their efforts to address housing insecurity for locals with developmental disabilities. They also discussed the state’s newly signed budget that invested about $25 million for supportive housing for disabled Washington residents.

The governor finished his visit by stopping at the WSU Bear Center, the only specialized bear research center in the state. Inslee sat down with researchers to talk about how captive bears are studied to understand wild bear populations. Inslee was happy to see the bears that had recently come out of hibernation. He kidded they made sure to wake up for his anticipated visit.

Pearce can be reached at epearce@dnews.com