BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

standpoint, Clalit’s main role was to develop health services that would be sufficient to serve to an adequate degree the country’s entire Jewish community (the Yishuv , in Hebrew) in kibbutzim, moshavim, development towns, and urban neighborhoods; And Clalit’s hospitals were all on an academic level. Another principle was the principle of equality and mutual assistance, e.g., that membership dues from the center of the country would assist opening medical services on the periphery. The last principle was that money would have no role in the doctor-patient relationships. 23 A fundamental condition for good and proper medical standards is striving relentlessly for equality and refusing to allow money to stand between the doctor and the patient. All this attracted me, because I was well familiar with the opposite, private medicine, having done my residency at the Jewish Hospital in Buenos Aires where I became all too familiar with the dominance of private medicine in some places abroad. I totally identified with the principles of Israeli public health as I understood them, and as I expressed them in the various capacities I filled in Clalit during my career. Such identification runs like a thread in all my life endeavors in the diverse roles I’ve played in Clalit; in my teaching positions at Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion Universities; and in my volunteer work organizing health services. From Beer Sheva to London Seven years after I arrived in the Negev, I stood to replace Dr. Itzhak Shatal who was chief district physician and regional medical director of Clalit in the Negev. Dr. Tova Yeshurun Berman, 24 the medical director of Clalit proposed to send me for in-service training in public health at the University of London. To do so, she managed with great effort to secure a grant from WHO, among the handful of grants that the Ministry of Health allocated for study abroad. She was able to accomplish this even though the Ministry was not eager to allocate grants to Clalit and favored allocating them to services the Ministry was directly responsible for. I went ahead on my own to London, to prepare the ground, and Neomi came afterwards with our two children. My studies in London were an important juncture in my medical career. I delved into epidemiology. I can recall how I went to the professor of epidemiology and asked him whether the adaptation process of new immigrants to Israeli society ( mizug galuyot ) 25 could be a fruitful ground for epidemiological research. He said to me, “Yes, but you have to do this quickly, because the Diasporas are merging very fast.” Sir Austin Bradford Hill, among the first statisticians to engage in health as a topic, was my statistics instructor. I learned a lot in his course, and I was very much drawn to organization of health services. During this period, the first community health centers were being opened in England and Scotland. As part of my work, I studied the new health centers; and I surveyed most of the health centers that existed at the time. In Scotland I went to Edinburgh and Glasgow, where there were some very important centers; and I went to Stanraer. In Stranraer there was a very interesting health center because it combined a hospital and community services, a “cottage hospital.” At a later stage, I would copy this model for the Yoseftal Hospital in Eilat. 23 Yosef Meir, Ha-refu’a vha-Tzebor: Leket Ma’amarim (Medicine and the Public: A Compendium of Articles), collected and edited K. Tamari; Introduction by Yitzhak Kanev, Tel Aviv: Clalit Directorate, 1955. Published posthumously. 24 Dr. Tova Yeshurun Berman (1898-1997) was born in Ukraine, studied medicine in Kyiv, and immigrated to Israel in 1923. In 1948, she was elected as a member of the Clalit directorate and a member of the Medical Department in place of Dr. Josef (Yosef) Meir, who had been appointted director-general of the Ministry of Health. She served in this capacity until 1952 when she was appointed chair of the Clalit directorate’s Medical Committee and served as Clalit’s medical director until 1968. Tzipora Shachar-Rubin, Dr. Tova Yeshurun-Berman, ha-Giveret ha-Rishona b- Mamlechet Kupat Holim (Dr. Tova Yeshurun-Berman: The First Lady of the [Clalit] Sick Fund Kingdom). Dekel Publishers, 2013. 25 The Hebrew term is literally ‘merging Diaspora’, which in practice meant pressing for accelerated acculturation to transform Diaspora Jews who came from oriental-mizrachi communities in North Africa and Asia, and Holocaust survivors from Europe, into Israelis who conformed to the dominant culture and norms of the veteran Zionist-driven society and ruling socialist party.

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