UW tops in nation in primary-care medical schools

For the 18th consecutive year, the University of Washington ranked first among primary-care medical schools in the country, according to the annual rankings of graduate and professional programs released by U.S. News & World Report Tuesday.

Also in the top spot is the UW School of Nursing's master's program, which tied for the top ranking with Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania.

The master's/doctorate programs in the UW School of Public Health tied for sixth with Emory University.

The UW College of Engineering and School of Medicine's biomedical/bioengineering graduate program also received a strong ranking, placing fifth in the magazine's listing. The UW graduate program in computer science ranked seventh, with the specialty program in artificial intelligence ranked sixth, the specialty program in systems ranked fifth, and the specialty program in theory ranked eighth.

The College of Education's graduate program was tied for ninth with the University of Michigan and University of Wisconsin.

Here are more findings about the quality of UW's health programs:

• The UW School of Medicine ranked ninth among research medical schools. It ranked second in the nation, and first among public medical schools, in U.S. News calculations of National Institutes of Health (NIH) federal research grants. U.S. News reports the UW medical school received $717.8 million in NIH funding in fiscal year 2010.

• Academic specialties at the UW that ranked in the top ten for the quality of teaching medical students were: family medicine (first for 20th year in a row), rural medicine (first for 20th year in a row), AIDS (fifth), internal medicine (fifth), geriatrics (tied with Harvard at fifth), and pediatrics (eighth).

• The medical school's MEDEX program for training physician assistants tied for eighth with University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center — Dallas and University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-Newark.

• The UW School of Nursing graduate student specialty programs ranked in the top 10 were: community/public health (tied at first with Johns Hopkins University), adult nurse practitioner (tied for second with University of California-San Francisco), family nurse practitioner (second), pediatric nurse practitioner (third), and psychiatric/mental health (tied at ninth with Vanderbilt University).

For more information, see the magazine's website at www.usnews.com/education.