Bracken Killpack: Dental Education in Washington is on the Rise

The coming year will bring great news for Washington patients and dentistry. That’s because in 2025 our state will have first year predoctoral dental students enrolled in TWO dental schools across THREE different locations – UW-Gonzaga University Health Partnership Building (Spokane), Equity Hall at Pacific Northwest University (Yakima), and UW Health Sciences Center (Seattle).

The University of Washington School of Dentistry’s Regional Initiative in Dental Education (RIDE) program moved into the aforementioned building in Spokane earlier this year. RIDE is on track to expand its annual class size to 32 students. Students will be trained in Spokane for the first two years, meaning more RIDE students will spend less time in Seattle and more time in Spokane.

Pacific Northwest University (PNWU)’s School of Dental Medicine (SDM) has received its initial accreditation from CODA. PNWU’s first class will include 36 predoctoral students that will spend their first year in Yakima. The remaining three years will be spent in facilities affiliated with federally qualified health centers in either Kennewick, Tacoma or Yakima. As of the end of September, PNWU has already received over 800 applicants for its 36 spots.

Washington, regularly a top exporter thanks to industries like agriculture and aerospace, has been an importer of dentists for more than four decades. This century, Washington has only trained about a quarter of its dentist workforce in-state. Oregon, with a state population that is about half of Washington, has annually trained the most dentists in the Pacific Northwest over this time.

Despite being a prolific importer of dentists trained out-of-state, Washington has not seen a shortage of dentists on a per-capita basis. We have been in the top quintile of the number of dentists per 100,000 residents over the past 25 years. As many dentists in King County (one dentist per 948 people) can attest, Washington’s dentist workforce issue is a matter of distribution.

The problem of distribution is neither unique to dentistry nor to Washington. Nationally, health care workforce shortages are most pronounced in rural communities. To compound the issue, the rural health care workforce tends to be older and the percentage of students from rural communities enrolled in health care programs has declined.

Fortunately, there are solutions to addressing these issues and, at least in the case of dentistry in Washington, we are making strides in the right direction. Instead of doubling the number of dental students spending four years near Montlake, our increased investments in dentist education are being made in the best possible way – by focusing on eastern Washington, rural areas, and historically underserved communities.

Data show that health care workers often stay at or near where they complete their education. This makes sense, since students (and their families) gain lived experience where they do their training and can easily visualize their futures. The proof: Over 80% of RIDE graduates return to practice in rural and underserved communities. Another important trend: Unsurprisingly, individuals who grew up in rural or underserved communities are the most likely to work in those communities.

In other words, training dentists from rural or underserved communities in rural or underserved communities is the most effective way to improve Washington’s distribution of dentists.

Some in our dental community are concerned that an increase of 60 new dental graduates in Washington (not to mention additional graduates from other dental schools that have recently been or will soon be added across the country) is an issue. At the national level, there may well be an issue of oversupply of dentists looming in the coming years, which could result in closure and/or reduction in size of multiple dental schools.

However, I wholeheartedly believe that the dental education programs that will be the most resilient in the years ahead will be those that operate like RIDE and PNWU and focus on increasing the dentist workforce in underserved areas. I applaud both UW and PNWU for their foresight.

Dental education in our state is on the rise and is being built on a strong foundation that will serve us well for the rest of the 21st Century.