BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

The National Institute’s annual Dead Sea Conference has allowed many deliberations on aspects of operations. The structure of the gatherings that exists to this day did not evolve in stages as conferences were held. Rather the structure of deliberations was built after careful planning by committees. Of course, each conference involved small changes here and there, but the general framework was to choose a core topic that concerned the health system, and afterwards to break into workshops, sometime with guests from abroad, to share ideas and experiences of experts from other countries. There was also a second local conference of Israelis hosted by the Institute annually and attended by some 700 participants from all the relevant occupations. It was an example of how the work at the Institute seeks to integrate all the professions in the health system. It is reflected in the participation of everyone, that is, people from different disciplines coming from different perspectives of the system to have discussions of research studies that the Institute has promoted. As for the topics for research, from the start the Institute defined three core research areas: organization of health services, health economics, and quality of health services. Today, in addition, one special topic is added every year devoted to a current need. Sometimes, the Institute asked the health council to recommend topics for research, but there was not much response to these requests. Today the director-general of the Ministry of Health is cognizant of the Institute’s work and its achievements, and sometimes raises topics for study that the Institute is glad, of course, to incorporate in its work. The deliberations at the Institute’s conferences are published, and there are platforms for further discussion. such as the Scholars’ Forum. 169 If there is a message here for future generations, it is that the following things fundamentally changed the character and quality of health management in Israel: The presence of the Institute and its work; inauguration of studies in health management in all institutions of higher learning, a process impacted, without question, by the Institute; and changes in health management that I embarked on at Clalit. All three set in motion what I would label a Renaissance of enlightened health management in the State of Israel. Absorbing Immigrant Physicians from the Former Soviet Union In 1988, a short time before my service as director-general of Clalit drew to a close, or a bit afterwards, I was invited to a meeting at the Ministry of Health with two government ministers: Minister of Health Yaakov Tzur and Minister of Immigrant Absorption Yitzhak Haim Peretz. We discussed the question of how best to absorb the huge number of physicians expected to arrive in the approaching wave of mass aliyah from the Soviet Union. A committee was appointed and I was asked to head it. I proposed the composition of the committee members be Prof. Shimon Glick from Beer Sheva; Prof. Arieh Harel, 170 the director of Ichalov Hospital in Tel Aviv and a former ambassador to Moscow; and Dr. Peter Vardi, the head of the Ministry of Health’s medical personnel department, whose participation was clearly essential. After my resignation as director- general, we began work, setting up shop in Clalit’s training center where I had been given an office. Originally, we were told that positions (job slots) had been found for two thousand doctors. But then every week, I was receiving a call from Yossi Kochick, deputy director-general of the Ministry of Health, to find “solutions” for another five hundred doctors, then another five hundred, based upon the updates they were getting from inside the Soviet Union. 169 In the first year of the Institute’s operations, the Scholars’ Forum (in Hebrew, moadon chokrim or “Researchers’ Club”) was founded. The objective of the Scholars’ Forum was to facilitate open discussion on a range of problems in different realms of health policy and health services. with expectations that the interaction among researchers and senior officials would lead to fertile discussion – to reach conclusions, map avenues for implementing the findings of the research, plot future policy, and use the input to continue discourse. 170 Aryeh Harel, formerly Sternberg (1911-1998) was born in Kyiv and studied medicine in Imperial Russia. He immigrated to Israel in 1937 and was both a hospital administrator and professor of endocrinology. He was the director of Ichalov Hospital and president of the Magen David Adom. He served as Israel’s ambassador to the USSR from 1959-1962.

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