Medical students can now choose six months of integrated rural practice training

Four third-year UW medical students are currently participating in a new program to provide these future physicians with extensive training in rural medicine. Another training site will open in 1999.

Called WRITE, for WWAMI Rural Integrated Training Experience, the half-year program gives participants more time to get to know a small town, their patients, and the local medical community. (WWAMI stands for the states joined in an educational partner ship with the UW medical school: Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho.) Such long-term continuity is unusual in medical education. Traditionally medical students move from one training rotation to the next.

Participating towns for the first half of 1998 are Othello, Wash.; Sandpoint, Idaho; Hailey, Idaho; and Libby, Mont. In 1999, Colfax, Wash., will become a WRITE training site.

In addition to preceptors who will work directly with each student, others from each town's medical community will help teach the students. UW medical school faculty will visit the towns regularly to offer additional educational support.

Before starting the WRITE program, the students have already completed a specified amount of clinical training in medicine, psychiatry, surgery and obstetrics and gynecology.

The WRITE program was successfully pilot-tested this past year in Hailey and McCall, Idaho. It is modeled after the University of Minnesota's Rural Physician Associate Program (RPAP).

Dr. Joseph Chu, assistant dean for curriculum at the UW School of Medicine; Dr. Philip Cleveland, director of WWAMI Clinical Medical Education - Spokane; and Dr. James Blackman, director of WWAMI Clinical Education-Boise, are the WRITE administrators. Blackman and Cleveland are UW assistant deans for regional affairs and rural health. ¶

Leila Gray