Hospitals and schools play critical roles in their communities. Many residents judge a community's overall quality of life by how well it provides these basic, yet important, public services.

Our community is no exception. What is becoming increasingly more apparent is the relationship between quality health care and quality education; you can't have one without the other. And our community needs both.

We are entering an era of profound shortage of medical personnel. This shortage is particularly evident with physicians. A hospital administrator spends a great deal of time planning for future medical staff needs and developing a recruitment strategy to meet these needs.

Physicians looking to start or relocate a practice are being courted by countless hospitals and communities. Most doctors can choose between a dozen different practice opportunities in communities throughout the state.



Schools rank No. 1

It is our experience that the single most important selection criterion for a doctor and his or her family is quality of community and schools. Interestingly, quality of schools often trumps all other community selection criteria. Our ability to recruit and retain quality physicians, RNs and other health care professionals is directly related to our ability to provide a quality educational experience for their children.

So how do doctors evaluate our schools? Physicians are data-driven people and just as they analyze data while evaluating your health, they often review and analyze school performance data when evaluating our school system. Doctors tend to be less interested in local opinions about school quality and far more interested in objective performance measures like classroom size, standardized test performance and levy support history.

In fact, it is not uncommon to have the physician research this data before coming to our community, even to the point of comparing our school standing with schools in competing practice opportunity communities like Mount Vernon and Olympia. Levy support history is a measure of how well a community supports its schools and, by extension, its children.



Poor funding, poor outcomes

Adequate hospital funding is important because doctors understand the correlation between a well-funded hospital and the quality of care patients receive. In a hospital setting, doctors know a predictable consequence of underfunding is poorer outcomes for their patients.

The same is true with our children in our schools. Adequate school funding is important because schools that are underfunded cannot hire enough teachers, buy needed textbooks and maintain their buildings appropriately. This underfunding leads to poorer outcomes for their students.

Doctors also appreciate the profound difference education can make in life. Most physicians are products of a caring community and a quality education system, one where a teacher sparked an interest and made a difference in their life. They deeply appreciate the fact that education led them to a fascinating career and a better life for their family. They want the same for their own children and for the children they see and treat in their daily practice.

If our community wants to attract the next generation of quality physicians, RNs and other health care professionals, we must have a forward-thinking and family friendly community. This requires a high-quality, adequately funded school system.

We encourage you to support our health care community by supporting schools and the children attending them. Please vote yes on Feb. 9 for the Sequim School District maintenance and operations levy.

Eric Lewis is CEO of Olympic Medical Center. Mike Glenn is his predecessor.