Medicine (WMed) on May 1st as successor to founding dean Dr. Hal Jenson, who retired after 10 years in office. Just a month after Termuhlen’s tenure, Western Michigan University announced a historic, anonymous donation of $ 550 million to the university over the course of 10 years. WMed will receive $ 300 million of the donation, the largest donation ever made to a public university. MiBiz spoke to Termuhlen about how they intend to use the funds and where WMed is going after reaching the 10-year milestone.
What were your thoughts when WMed received such a transformation grant a month after you started as dean?
Dr. Paula Termuhlen, Dean of Western Michigan University Homer Stryker MD School of Medicine
PHOTO WITH KINDNESS
The exciting thing is to realize that one of the greatest challenges facing medicine today is creating equity in health for all, and that every medical school has a role to play in this.
Now we can really create an identity and what we can be known for. In order for this gift to resonate and for the work we had to do to be recognized, we can develop an inspiring and ambitious vision on health equity. I’m so excited. This now gives us the opportunity to attend a young school and really change something with our space.
The challenge now is: this is hard work and we expect to be held accountable not only by our benefactors but also by our community for doing this work at a high level and being responsible for managing a gift like that.
Are other medical schools taking this focused approach to diversity, equity and inclusion, or is WMed trying to create the blueprint?
People do a lot of really good work, and I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that the historically black colleges and universities and their medical schools are part of that system – they own that work forever. It’s part of their DNA, that’s why they exist. Aside from having a school like ours, which is a smaller and private school in the Midwest – nobody else does this job and we have the opportunity to do it.
You mentioned that you hope to use the donation to help fund WMed students. Is financial hardship the biggest barrier to accessing medical education?
It is one of the most urgent needs, but it is not the only urgent need. Here’s the reality: I’m a first generation student and I just paid off my student loans the same month I became the dean of a medical school. This happens in families that do not have the resources where their students eventually go on to medical school and may be first-generation students. This is often seen among underrepresented populations and minorities. And not just color students, but also other diversity measures.
It’s about creating wealth for families over time. (Financial aid) enables them to spend their resources on their children so that you can build economic capacity in families over generations.
And tuition fees are just part of the financial dilemma of studying medicine?
Especially among students who are arriving and have a lower socio-economic status. Let’s say they get the tuition and they get financial support for living. That often doesn’t cover everything. There are now several schools across the country beginning to understand what it means that the food insecurity of their student body is there. We actually have medical schools that make food shelves and so on. I can’t speak for WMed explicitly other than knowing it exists. I don’t have any data on this yet, but it’s real, and now we’re having nationwide conversations about what we’re doing with our medical students as they try to become young doctors and also worried about whether they’ll have enough to eat.
What’s next after WMed hits the 10 year milestone?
We must do a good job figuring out how to create a medical workforce that reflects and understands the people we serve. That really focuses on the components of diversity, equity, inclusion and equity. We have to do a bit of work to really write down how we do this work, and then we can actually think about, ‘Okay, let’s grow some more, let’s expand our classes and do more.’ The current bottleneck is our ability to identify clinical sites within our two hospital partners and in some of the communities in southwest Michigan with which we have relationships. Over time we look for opportunities and partners to expand. We’ll keep an eye out while we do this work on the front lines.
Does WMed keep track of where its graduates end up working? If so, did the school manage to keep graduates in Michigan?
We are so young After studying medicine, you must complete additional training in your specialist area. We only have one class that barely made it out the door and not even a full class because some of them are still in training. However, this is absolutely critical to our work. This is something that most schools pursue in some way, but for me personally, my dream is that not only do we pursue where people practice and serve communities, but I want to know how they do it. We will be following all of this very, very carefully over time.
source https://collegeeducationnewsllc.com/wmed-lands-historic-financial-gift-as-medical-students-face-financial-challenges/
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