BOISE — The Idaho Medical Association and Idaho State University have asked the state Board of Education to look at the cost of getting Idaho a medical school.
Many Idaho students are qualified to go to medical school, but they lack opportunities, said ISU's interim president, Michael Gallagher.
On Wednesday, Gallagher asked the state board for a feasibility study on expanding medical education in Idaho to help doctors and patients.
"We've got all kinds of health care needs that aren't being met," Gallagher said.
Idaho is one of only a handful of states without its own medical school. Others include Wyoming, Alaska, and Montana, and for many years Idaho has belonged, with those states, to a cooperative program that reserves spots for their students at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Each year, 18 Idaho students are admitted to the UW medical school.
In a separate program, another eight Idaho students are admitted annually to the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City.
The state of Idaho subsidizes Idaho students' tuition so they pay the same amount as Washington or Utah students to attend medical school in those states, instead of higher out-of-state fees.
But advocates said Idaho needs its own medical school — perhaps in Pocatello, where ISU already provides much of the state's health services training.
One reason is that competition for Idaho's 26 spots in Washington and Utah is fierce — Gallagher estimated only a quarter of the qualified Idaho applicants get in.
Another is that students who leave Idaho to study medicine often set up their practice somewhere else.
"Idaho suffers from a chronic lack of physicians," Patrice Burgess, the president of the Idaho Medical Association, said in a Dec. 5 letter to the board that also requested a study of the costs and benefits of establishing a medical school. Her letter said Idaho ranks 49th or 50th in the nation for its ratio of doctors to residents.
Burgess asked the board to put the matter on its agenda as soon as possible, and said many physicians have offered to help with a study. She praised the Washington and Utah programs, and said both schools would be willing to increase the number of Idaho students admitted if the Idaho Legislature and the state Board of Education agreed.
The association isn't leaning toward any particular option — it is open to everything from a new school, with labs and professors, to an expansion of existing opportunities, said Bob Seehusen, a spokesman for the group.
"Sooner or later, we're going to have to have better access to medical school for our brightest students," Seehusen said. "Whether that needs to be bricks and mortar (or) buying more seats at other universities around neighboring states, we're hoping that the Board of Education will come up with that."
ISU and the association did not coordinate their requests for studies, Seehusen said.
Gallagher, who spoke to the board on the matter at its Dec. 1 meeting in Pocatello, said he would like the study to include training not only for physicians, but for physician assistants, medical technologists, nurses and others.
"It's the same demographic, the same need," Gallagher said. "Let's see how we're going to provide the health care professionals in the future."
The board, which oversees higher education in Idaho, had never heard a formal proposal for an Idaho medical school until Gallagher's on Dec. 1, said Luci Willets, a board spokeswoman.
"The board's reaction was, 'This is a good start,' " Willets said. The board hasn't responded to Gallagher's letter, but it has studied complex issues before, and "certainly something of this magnitude would require a great deal of study," Willets said.
Idaho students admitted to the University of Washington program take their first year of classes at the University of Idaho in Moscow, and the rest in Seattle. There are some postgraduate medical residency programs in Idaho.