BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

ENGLISH EDITION EDITOR’S NOTE I first met Haim Doron, briefly, in January 1987. I had spent a couple of weeks as a guest at the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) where a series of interviews and visits allowed me to learn about the Israeli health system, particularly about Clalit. My last interview before returning to the United States was with Prof. Doron in his office in Clalit headquarters in Tel Aviv. Then, after he stepped down as the director-general of Clalit and was on sabbatical, he visited me in my office at Harvard Community Health Plan, then a small HMO in Boston. Though we then knew each other casually, we became friends about a decade later when Haim joined the International Academic Review Committee of BGU, where we served together for about 20 years. Haim was an extraordinary person. He had very strong, excellent values. One might say that he had “True North” principles which include “integrity, moderation, self-discipline, loyalty, responsibility, honesty, and patience.” In this book, he illustrates his dedication to Zionism, socialism, and doing things for the benefit of all people. His career-long interest was in seeing better health and health care in Israel through a strong health care delivery system, an excellent healthcare workforce, and scholarship that would guide developing greater effectiveness and efficiency in every aspect of healthcare. He firmly believed in the integration of the various components of health care. He championed the need to integrate the continuum of care between hospital and community, the need to integrate physical and mental health services, and the need to have interprofessional team care. As much as Haim achieved in his lifetime, his vision can still serve as a map for the future in health care delivery, health professions education, and health services research. It has been an honor to be able to edit the English translation of this book. I have taken some liberties in the wording and also added a number of footnotes in an effort to make the narrative as readable as possible by persons who, like me, are not likely to know the details that Israelis reading the original Hebrew edition would know.

Stephen C. Schoenbaum, MD, MPH March 2022

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