SitNews - Stories in the News - Ketchikan, Alaska

First Medical Education Student Begins Training in Southeast Alaska

 

July 29, 2015
Wednesday PM

Southeast Alaska's first WWAMI student, Monica Cox
Photo courtesy PeaceHealth


(SitNews) Ketchikan, Alaska - Through a formal affiliation arrangement to establish a health system collaboration agreement, patients in southeast Alaska who access care through PeaceHealth are able to tap into the expertise of some of the best advanced medical care providers in the region. Today, this regional medical education program is known as WWAMI which is an acronym representing the states it serves, Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho.

PeaceHealth and the University of Washington Medicine developed this formal health system collaboration agreement in May 2013. PeaceHealth participates in the WWAMI program in two states, Alaska and Washington.

On the flip side of this agreement, the University of Washington Medicine is benefitting from the agreement as medical students in the UW Alaska WWAMI TRUST program are able to spend portions of their residency training in small, rural, underserved communities. This special curriculum connects students who ultimately desire to practice primary care in a rural area to a community throughout their 4-year residency process.

In August, Southeast Alaska's first WWAMI student, Monica Cox will begin her training in Alaska when she visits Ketchikan and Prince of Wales for the first time. Now a first year medical student, Cox completed her undergraduate training at the University of Alaska in Anchorage while working as a scribe in the Emergency Department at Providence Alaska Medical Center.

Cox’s first “Summer Experience” visit to Alaska July 31 to August 22 will help her get to know our communities and get a feel for the PeaceHealth team that she will be training with in intervals over the next four years. Monica looks forward to meeting many community members at the Blueberry Festival in Ketchikan on Saturday, August 1, where she will spend time helping at the PeaceHealth booth - which will be set up to provide a comfortable space for mothers to breastfeed and change babies in honor of World Breastfeeding Week.

Cox will make her first visit to the PeaceHealth clinic in Craig August 9 through 11 and hopes to have opportunities to meet a number of community members as she explores the area a bit. Cox will be onsite several times over the next few years and during her third year of residency, she will spend extensive time in Souteast Alaska.

 

 

Edited by Mary Kauffman, SitNews

 

Source of News:

PeaceHealth Ketchikan Medical Center
www.peacehealth.org/ketchikan


 



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