How would you go about designing a medical school if given the opportunity? Dr. George Novan is one of the founders of and continues to teach at Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine. Dr. Novan finds that the presence of mentorship is critical to building a successful healthcare community. Listen to learn why Dr. Novan worries about Covid’s impact on the role of mentorship in healthcare, why he believes his work in the community of Spokane makes a difference, and where he finds joy in the process.
“Finding Joy: The Health Care Professional’s Journey to Well-being" is a podcast resource developed by a team of interprofessional education researchers from Washington State University Health Sciences Spokane. They’re promoting well-being among students, faculty, and healthcare professionals during challenging times. Funding is provided by the Health Resources and Services Administration.
The Interprofessional Education Research team wishes to thank the following individuals for their invaluable contributions to this project:
• Dr. Barb Richardson, nurse, educator, and interprofessional champion;
• Cameron Cupp, creator of the “Finding Joy” musical score and current enrollee at WSU Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine;
• Washington State University staff from Marketing and Communications, Financial Services, and the Collaboration for Interprofessional Health Education Research and Scholarship; and
• Claire Martin-Tellis, Executive Producer, and Solen Aref, student intern, who developed the first five episodes of the “Finding Joy” podcast.
This episode of “Finding Joy” was produced by Doug Nadvornick, Program Director, Spokane Public Radio.
If you would like to reach out, please contact our team by sending an email to: medicine.ipoc@wsu.edu We also encourage you to visit our podcast blog as well as our team's website at: https://opioideducation.wsu.edu/about/.
“Finding Joy: The Health Care Professional’s Journey to Well-being" is a podcast resource developed by a team of interprofessional education researchers from Washington State University Health Sciences Spokane. They’re promoting well-being among students, faculty, and healthcare professionals during challenging times. Funding is provided by the Health Resources and Services Administration.
The Interprofessional Education Research team wishes to thank the following individuals for their invaluable contributions to this project:
• Dr. Barb Richardson, nurse, educator, and interprofessional champion;
• Cameron Cupp, creator of the “Finding Joy” musical score and current enrollee at WSU Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine;
• Washington State University staff from Marketing and Communications, Financial Services, and the Collaboration for Interprofessional Health Education Research and Scholarship; and
• Claire Martin-Tellis, Executive Producer, and Solen Aref, student intern, who developed the first five episodes of the “Finding Joy” podcast.
This episode of “Finding Joy” was produced by Doug Nadvornick, Program Director, Spokane Public Radio.
If you would like to reach out, please contact our team by sending an email to: medicine.ipoc@wsu.edu We also encourage you to visit our podcast blog as well as our team's website at: https://opioideducation.wsu.edu/about/.
This is “Finding Joy: The Health Care Professional’s Journey to Well-being.” It’s a podcast resource developed by a team of interprofessional education researchers from Washington State University Health Sciences Spokane. They’re promoting well-being among students, faculty, and healthcare professionals during challenging times. Funding is provided by the Health Resources and Services Administration.
[theme music]
I’m Doug Nadvornick.
Dr. George Novan has had a long, rich history of caring for people and teaching medical students. He also had a front row seat as medical education developed in Spokane, Washington. He was one of the creators of Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine. He has retired as an administrator, but he’s still active in training students to work with patients.
Before we start, a disclaimer. I worked with George Novan for seven years when I was a health sciences writer on the WSU Spokane campus. And now, on to our interview.
George Novan: “I started at the UCLA School of Medicine as a medical student in 1963. I graduated in 1973 and I went to University of California Irvine Medical Center for my residency. I did it in internal medicine. I also did an infectious disease fellowship there. And I also was chief resident for Internal Medicine at UCI Medical Center over about a five year span. Went into practice in Orange County, California, where UCI is located. I worked at St. Joseph Hospital, which is now part of our Providence Network and continued to do some teaching at UCI Medical Center after I graduated. And then in 1983, I became the Internal Medicine Residency director at St. Joseph Hospital, which was one of UC’s training facilities. And so at that point, I was half time doing infectious disease consultation and half time teaching internal medicine residents.”
George Novan later moved from Southern California to Spokane to work with medical students and residents. Residents are newly-graduated medical students who begin their careers as doctors with a required three-to-seven years of training in their specialty areas.
George Novan: “I’ve always held the belief that doctors are the ones who, quote, ‘teach their patients.’ They help them understand what they have. They lay out kind of a journey they're going to have to go on if there's a diagnosis to be made or treatment to be rendered. And they accompany them on that journey and basically guiding teaching and also caring for. I found that part of my career very fulfilling and sometimes humbling. I was fortunate in my career to have some wonderful mentors, people who kept in touch with me long after I graduated and moved into practice. I see medicine as a mentoring profession and what I do when I teach, I'm basically passing on everything that's been given to me by others and hopefully setting an example to develop the same approach when it comes to passing on the tradition and the knowledge of medicine.”
Doug: “So if I extrapolate from that, that teaching hasn’t changed a lot in those 40-50 years, but where has it changed?”
George Novan: “It hasn't changed for centuries, if you think about it, if you look at it from a pass on tradition that's been there for a long, long time, basically from Hippocrates and before him, even to the present time. But what has changed potentially is at least if I look at it from the last couple of years, is sort of a development of and especially with the Covid pandemic sort of this high tech zoom like attendance of conferences. What I find uncomfortable with that is I was brought up, and I still believe that in a system where you are looking at the faces of the learners, you get much more out of it and in an in-person setting than you do. So what I see happening in medicine is sort of offloading some of the in person components of it to a sort of an online component or I'll do it by myself at home component. And I think I don't want that to impact the mentoring aspect.”
Doug: “So you’ve had the chance to mentor two or even three generations of medical students. How have they changed?”
George Novan: “In the one-on-one settings, I'm gonna say they haven't other, other than I think, at least when I do still teach in person, they're brighter than I was probably. I think they're sharper. They're more worldly. They're not experienced yet, but they have had a lot more come at them in life, I suspect. But, from a standpoint of understanding and having them teach me, I don't think I've seen much change at all.”
Doug: “One of the things that I was always most impressed by is if you ask them about what were your preparations leading up to this and there was always, ‘I did mission work here,’ ‘I did a year fellowship here.’ Holy moly. All that preparation just to line up to get into medical school. Is that new?”
George Novan: “Absolutely more than I did. In my medical school, it basically boiled down to how did you do as an undergrad? How did you do on the medical college admission tests? What kind of letters of recommendation did you get? And absolutely no prior outside experience in the medical field. You know, at times, I suspect some are truly motivated to what they do, and I suspect that others might do it to pad their resume and CV . That is not the way I think it should be done. I also feel that it's become sort of de rigueur that is what is required to make you a candidate. I don't think that's true. I wish there was a way to look into the heart of a person without having them put stuff onto their resume that shows they did X number of things for X number of hours. I know schools sort of require it. I just feel that they're heading into a life that's going to be a lot of hard work. They don't need all that extra work before they even stop.”
Doug: [with theme music underneath] “You’re listening to the Finding Joy podcast. We’re talking with Dr. George Novan from the WSU College of Medicine.”
Doug: “So you had the privilege of being in on the ground floor of a new medical school. Tell me about what it was like to figure out how are we going to make this work?”
George Novan: “I think there were like three of us in the beginning, and I won't name names. We had all had experience teaching in medical schools. I had decades. In fact, I was a clerkship coordinator for the school that was the state's only medical school at the time. Another gentleman in the process was a leader of a process at the University of Minnesota. One of the things that came up early on was there is this cross-state rivalry, where the leadership there felt that a second medical school was not needed. I was of the impression that having your own school adds a little more oomph, a little more pizazz to your community than having a sort of plopped in that could leave at any time school. The argument they gave us was that they already had a school here in Spokane, WWAMI. But it really wasn't our school. And the punchline is, having your own school benefits your university and your community to a much greater degree than if you are affiliated with another school. We wanted to have a system in place that would attract more research, attract more practitioners in both the field of medicine and all the other healthcare fields that having a sort of a magnet university medical school present. And then also, obviously, develop medical students who may have a 50-50 chance of staying in the community or in the region to practice medicine. That was our goal and while that was an espoused goal of our sister university in the state, I don't think there was as much emphasis as there would've been if as was and has become our own school.”
Doug: “And as it went along the espoused value was we’re going to admit only people who either live in Washington or have some sort of familial ancestral tie to Washington, with a goal of keeping as many of those as you said in the state. How well do you think that’s worked so far?”
George Novan: “I can't give you the exact answer to that because I'm no longer on the admissions process. I was on the admissions committee when we began, but I don't know the percentage, but I think it's still holding relatively true to form as to what they wanted to do. I also want to mention just very briefly, when we began this process, I came from a state that, at the time I left, was about 38 million people. That was in 1990 and, by about 2014, it was up to about 39 million people. They had nine university-based medical schools in a state of 39 million people. In 2014 in Washington, we had seven million people. We had one medical school. Just by population alone, we could house two medical schools, university-affiliated allopathic medical schools, if we followed the kind of proportion that I saw in California. Another reason to have a second medical school: UW has what is called their WWAMI program. They basically plop training in affiliated states. That does not lead to growth over time. I was in it enough to see little steps being made at all of the affiliated sites, but not the kind of thing that we've generated with our 80 medical students now at Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine.”
Doug: “So what was your role, at then very start, when the three of you started putting it together. You hired a founding dean and started bringing in folks. What was your role?”
George Novan: “Literally any committee that needed a chair and was empty, I was plopped onto it. But I think in the beginning, before we hired the dean, we took turns basically doing everything we can, reach out to the community, presenting in front of legislators, advertising what we were trying to do, recruiting a dean, while at the same time still working in an affiliated WWAMI program with University of Washington. So once we got the dean, then we ended up, he ended up assigning us to different things. And again, at the beginning, there weren't a lot of us. So consequently, we wore several hats, various committees and mission committees, faculty committees of one sort or another. We just sort of did everything that was needed until we began to hire and attain greater numbers of faculty.”
Doug: “So now you’ve stepped away from it other than your occasional teaching. How do you feel about your time helping WSU create a medical school?”
George Novan: “Great. It's turned out better than I expected. I thought it would take longer, but it has turned out better. What I find very, very interesting is that as we look to grow, our sister institution from Seattle looked to grow as well. And right now, if you look at the basic science components of medical school, we have, I believe the number is, if you look at it from the first and second year classes, Washington State is training 160 students. UW Gonzaga is training 80, a total of 240 in Spokane. Seattle has 200. I find it incredible that we have that many students here. But I also find it sort of a realization that by people outside of Spokane, that the healthcare community in Spokane is absolutely incredible. It is, I believe, a magnet for a variety of healthcare workers and will continue to be. We have major universities, which I think will be supplying students to our area and then doctors to our area. I’ll give you a great instance. The very first UW WWAMI student that I knew before he even got into UW is now my next door neighbor and is a practicing, pulmonary critical care position here in Spokane and I have other students along the same way and residents that have graduated from Providence that are in this community and have never left and or are in surrounding communities. I think that makes this a huge success. More than that, I have had the ability to teach, the ability to be part of this, the ability has probably been the most fulfilling aspect of my medical career. There is a joy to taking care of patients and teaching them and guiding them on their journey. And there is an incredible fulfillment in teaching students and residents and some of them are actually physicians for me and my wife right now. So I find that unbelievable.”
George Novan is one of the founders of Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine. He still teaches medical students. We thank him for sharing his experiences.
[theme music]
We also thank the following individuals for their contributions to this project:
• Dr. Barb Richardson, nurse, educator, and interprofessional champion;
• Cameron Cupp, creator of the “Finding Joy” musical score and current enrollee at WSU Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine;
• Washington State University staff from Marketing and Communications, Financial Services, and the Collaboration for Interprofessional Health Education Research and Scholarship; and
• Claire Martin-Tellis, the original executive producer of the podcast, and student intern Solen Aref. They developed the first five episodes of “Finding Joy.”
This episode was produced by Doug Nadvornick.
If you are interested in sharing your perspective about well-being as a healthcare professional or would like to reach out, please contact our team by sending an email to: medicine.ipoc@wsu.edu. We encourage you to visit our website at: https://opioideducation.wsu.edu/about/.