BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

PROLOGUE The work at hand is autobiographical. It covers my endeavors in sixty-five years of involvement with the health system in Israel, between the years 1952-2017, including thirty-five years in the operations in Clalit Sick Fund (today Clalit Health Services Organization). I have no intentions here to glorify my actions, but rather to share my own path in the health system, while giving voice to my opinion on issues and problems relevant for discussion in coming generations. However, I don’t mainly seek to talk about them, but rather to describe the processes involved in the establishment of some of the core endeavors I had the privilege to play a part in their founding -- at times even as a decisive participant. These are, for example, locating a medical school in the Negev, anchoring family medicine as a recognized specialization in Israel, founding the National Institute for Health Services and Policy Research in Israel, and more. Other endeavors I had the privilege to participate in, and I don’t make light of their importance, are establishing the School of Health Professions at Tel Aviv University and finding Irving Schneider and convincing him to establish the first pediatric hospital in Israel, an institution that already has splendidly served the health needs of several generations of Israeli children. The book faithfully expresses my outlook on the absolute imperative of egalitarian public medicine and ruling out any mixing or blending of public medicine with private medicine. Dr. Yosef Meir stated this position1 in his book Medicine and the Public, and I also believe that money has no place in mediation of the physician-patient relationship. If somewhere down the road, a researcher will consider it worthwhile to investigate this formative period and delve into the facts as they were, I hope the material within – to be added to the National Institute’s archives – will be of utility.

1 Dr. Yosef Meir (1890-1953) was born in Galicia (Poland), studied medicine in Vienna, and immigrated to Israel in 1911. A physician and tuberculosis specialist. He was director of Clalit from 1928 up to establishment of the state in 1948, and director-general of the Ministry of Health from May 1949 to September 1950. He initiated and organized the airlift and immigration of Yemenite Jewry in 1950. Sachlav Stoller Liss, Shifra Shvarts, Mordechai Shani, L’hiyot Am Ba’ree b-Artzeinu (To Be a Healthy People in Our Land), Ben-Gurion University Press, 2016, 29-52; Yosef Meir, Ha-refu’a vha-Tzebor: Leket Ma’amarim (Medicine and the Public: A Compendium of Articles; collected and edited K. Tamari, Tel Aviv: Clalit Directorate, 1955. On the history of the Clalit see also: https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781580462792/health-and-zionism/ https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781580461221/the-workers-health-fund-in-eretz-israel/

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