University of Washington School of Medicine


The University of Washington School of Medicine is a public medical school in the northwest United States, located in Seattle and affiliated with the University of Washington.
UWSOM is the first public medical school in the states of Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. The school maintains a network of teaching facilities in more than 100 towns and cities across the five-state region. As part of this "WWAMI" partnership, medical students from Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho spend their first year and a half at the University of Wyoming, the University of Alaska Anchorage, the Montana State University, or the University of Idaho, respectively. In addition, sixty first-year students and forty second-year students from Washington are based at Gonzaga University in Spokane.

UW Medicine includes the UWSOM, as well as a number of clinical facilities owned and operated by the UW, including the following:
In addition, UW Medicine shares in the ownership and governance of Children’s University Medical Group and Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, a partnership between UW Medicine, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Seattle Children's.

History

The school was founded in 1946 as the 76th medical school in the country and is a leader in primary care, family medicine, biomedical research, experimental therapy, clinical treatments, and academic medicine. In 2014, the UW School of Medicine was ranked #10 in research and #1 in primary care and in rural medicine by U.S. News and World Report. The UW School of Medicine also ranks as one of the top medical schools in receipt of federal researching funding, having been awarded $712.3 million in grants by the National Institutes of Health in 2009. Only Harvard Medical School was awarded more federal funding.
In May 2013, it was announced that UW Medicine and PeaceHealth were coming together in a "strategic affiliation." The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the merger as PeaceHealth is "directed by the Catholic Ethical and Religious Directives" and UW Medicine is taxpayer-funded.