The University of Washington-Gonzaga University Health Partnership is based in what is now called the 840 Building, at the south end of the Gonzaga campus. A few years ago, it became the Spokane home for the UW School of Medicine. It's now also the new home to the UW dental school, which began in the Spokane area in 2008. The program is called RIDE, Rural Initiatives in Dental Education. Eastern Washington University is the partner institution. It enrolls 16 new students each year, up from eight annually in 2024.
For the last month, dental school dean André Ritter has lived in Spokane to get a deep look at how RIDE operates.
This interview is lightly edited for length and clarity.
Andre Ritter: Over the past year, we have been able to grow the program and really set it up the way that we feel it should have been in terms of the physical space. We were able to get additional funding from the state to increase the number of students that participate in the program, as well as to develop a new facility in the Health Peninsula. So the timing was right, I felt, for us to be immersed in the community and raising awareness for oral health as well as for our RIDE program.
DN: Why is this such a good space for you?
AR: It allows our students, faculty, and staff to be under one roof. Up until we were able to open this space (last fall), our students were training in the (EWU) Catalyst Building, so there was not a lot of adjacencies that we now have here in this building. With the expansion of the program in 2024, we not only increased the number of students, but we expanded the curriculum from one to two years. And then as part of the second year, we then had to have a state-of-the-art training space and simulation, and we were able to build that here in this space.
DN: Eastern, for a long time, has had a clinic down on the Riverpoint campus where their students can continue to practice along with other dentists. That is moving up here as well, is that correct?
AR: The Eastern dental hygiene program is moving across the street from us at the SIERR Building and that also provides opportunities for us to continue and maybe even strengthen that collaboration, because they're going to have a clinical facility to support their nationally recognized dental hygiene program. Our dental students in the second year need access to a clinical facility as well for them to be able to do a little bit of clinical training initially. And that adjacency with the Eastern program here just across the street makes that possible as well.
DN: You share a building with the medical school and you're across the street from the PA program, the MEDEX program. Being in proximity to those, how does that help you?
AR: Our students in dentistry have anatomy classes, for example, with the students in the School of Medicine as part of the WWAMI program. We don't currently have classes with GU or with dental hygiene outside of the clinical spaces that I shared before. But this proximity, I think, provides opportunity for further collaboration. As part of our vision for the program to continue to grow is we want to continue to develop opportunities for education as well as research collaboration.
DN: In terms of placing your students, let's say, in those rural areas, where are the successes you've had and where are the challenges?
AR: We had a great trajectory of success in returning our students or placing them in those shortage areas. The RIDE program, since it started in 2008, about 80% of our graduates go back and practice in rural and underserved areas, many times in dental practices, but also in community health centers.
I feel strongly that the reason we have such a great success is that we not only have recruitment from those areas. Our director of recruitment is from Yakima as well, so there's a lot of emphasis on recruiting applicants from those areas for dental school. They already have that connection with those communities.
In addition to that, as part of the program, they train here in Spokane, but also in the fourth year of dental school, each of the RIDE students spend six months doing clinical dentistry in a community health center across the eastern part of the state. That allows them to further sort of be immersed in those communities. They sort of develop ties even with patients and family of patients in those settings, and many times they are recruited by those community health centers, which is something that I have witnessed. You know, it happens many times.
DN: So even though you're putting more of your students out in those areas, is there still a great demand for dentists out in those rural areas especially?
AR: Absolutely. So although we have had good success with this program, there's more that kind of should be done, right? There is an incredible need in the majority of the counties in the state of Washington. 38 of the 39 counties are designated health profession shortage areas, and we definitely have the opportunity to do more in those areas. And I think with the expansion of the RIDE program, doubling the class size and increasing the amount of time they're training here in the eastern part of the state, we will continue to address those shortage areas.
DN: So you're able to kind of hit it through the admissions process as well in terms of targeting the students from different parts of the state who might be more likely to stay in eastern Washington.
AR: Absolutely, yeah. And we also, with the expanded number of students, with more students, we were able to attract students from adjacent states as well. We have a few students from Montana and Idaho as well. And the future expansion of the program includes establishing partnerships with institutions in Montana and other states as part of the WWAMI program to potentially attract students from those areas so that they can also continue to contribute as well to shortage areas in those states.
The WWAMI program at the UW Medicine is really our model. WWAMI has been in place for much longer than our RIDE program is, but it is a model in terms of educating and training the next generation of physicians or healthcare providers in addressing shortage in access to care across the region. Our vision is for a RIDE program to grow along those lines. There are many states in the Pacific Northwest that don't have dental schools. So we see this as an opportunity for us to extend our program in those areas and address the need for dental education as well as oral healthcare in those communities.
DN: Especially as we know, that dental health plays a bigger role in human health than we originally thought.
AR: Absolutely, yeah. It's a very good point. I think still today, there's a big disconnect between the mouth and the rest of the body, right? In dental schools, we are part of that.
I recognize that some of this is a culture shift that we have to take ownership of in terms of dental education. In dental schools, we focus on the mouth, on the teeth, on the gums, on issues that are happening in the mouth and the oral facial system as a whole. And then in medical school, oftentimes, the students don't learn a lot about that part of the body. We need to bring those things back together because you don't see people out there, the mouth is part of the body, right? But I think what's new right now is that there's more and more evidence that diseases that impact, or oral diseases have an impact in overall health. So there's a relationship between periodontal disease and heart disease, for example, diabetes.
Of course, you have to have good oral health to have good nutrition, to be able to chew, to be able to eat well, and that is something that is recognized as an overall health issue, poor nutrition. Also, good oral health is important for your overall well-being. If you have a toothache or if you have something that makes you feel uncomfortable with your mouth, that has an impact on the ability of students to go to school, people to do their jobs properly.
So there is an economic impact of dental problems. And this adds up significantly. And if we can make sure that we recognize oral health as part of overall health, I think it will be a little easier perhaps to address this more in an intentional way. And this also would allow us to do more in terms of medical and dental integration from an education standpoint, but also from a patient care standpoint.
DN: Forgive me if you've already said it, but are your medical students taking dental classes or required to take some of the classes within the School of Dentistry in order to be able to get through a part of their course?
AR: Yes. At the University of Washington, our medical students and our dental students have a common curriculum for some of their first and second year of our respective programs. They don't do the entire two years together because there are some specificities about each of those programs that are not applicable to the other program. But just as an example, in the dental school for the first year and a half, our dental students take a series of courses called biomedical foundations. In fact, some of our first year students are having a class right now on the renal system. So it's about renal system, cardiovascular, cancer in general, head and neck anatomy. There's a series of topics that our dental students learn about that is fundamentally biomedical and that prepares them well for a career as dentists that know much more than just what's inside of the mouth. For example, patients come in with high blood pressure. Our students are able to have conversations, educated conversations with their patients about a few things that they can do to address those things. I think the medical students learn a little more about dentistry as well. So they can also, in their practices, help their patients and their families with questions about oral health. I think that's fundamentally a model that we are aspiring to move towards. We're always going to have physicians. We're always going to have dentists. But I think the more we work together, it's going to be beneficial for our communities, for patients and their communities in general.