Dr. George Novan is an important figure in the development of medical education in Spokane. Last week, Novan retired from being a full-time faculty member at WSU. During his time, Spokane has blossomed, now with 120 new students per year between the two medical schools.
Novan came from southern California nearly 30 years ago to oversee Spokane's internal medicine residency program, which he did for more than a decade. If you’re not familiar with medical education, residents are brand new doctors; in most cases, just graduated from medical school. They spend between three and seven years essentially as apprentices to veteran doctors in their medical specialties.
For several years, Novan and his team taught third- and fourth-year medical students from the UW who came for their clinical rotations. Eventually, he joined the WSU team that taught first-year UW medical students in Spokane beginning the fall of 2008.
“My role here, originally, was to teach medical students how to do histories and physicals, very basic, and learn some of the initial steps in clinical reasoning and so forth, first-year students," Novan said. "And I joined Dr. Ken Roberts, who at the time was the director of the program and eventually became his assistant director and had much more of a role in oversight in what was then the WWAMI program at WSU.”
Click the box to hear our interview with Novan.