BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

We prepared a festive opening. In attendance were Prime Minister Golda Meir, U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, Beer Sheva mayor David Tuviyahu, and others. Opening of the school was delayed by a year due to the October 1973 Yom Kippur War; but it did open in 1974. To the best of my recollection, it opened with 36 enrollees. At that time, at the Central Hospital for the Negev, a school of nursing named for Paula Ben- Gurion was already in operation. 40 I had been the anatomy instructor at the school, and therefore was familiar with conditions there. The school of nursing, unlike other nursing schools in the country, was not an academic program. When I was no longer working in the Negev, but at Clalit’s directorate, Yosef Tekoa, who had been elected president of BGU after completing his tenure as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, asked to meet with me. He told me that one of the Recanati brothers was prepared to donate to establish a school of nursing at the university, provided it would be on a high academic level. I told him there was already a school of nursing at the hospital in Beer Sheva named after Paula Ben-Gurion. It would be no easy task to grapple with Ben- Gurion’s family on this issue, while at the same time it was out of the question there would be both a hospital-based school of nursing and a university-based academic school of nursing. I also told Recanati that in keeping with the spirit of the medical school in Beer Sheva, I would insist that a nursing school in the Negev would have to be community-oriented. Various other individuals in Clalit, not myself, engaged quite a bit with the family of Paula Ben- Gurion, in the end receiving the family’s agreement; and an academic-level school was established on the foundations of the existing school of nursing. Prof. Moshe Prywes, who was already serving as dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, appointed my friend Dr. Reuven Adler as the first director of the Recanati School of Community Health Professions. 41 Dr. Adler, who had previously been the IDF’s Chief Medical Officer and was a neurologist by training, dedicated himself to his new position. After serving as director of the school, he took a management position at the government-owned Rambam Hospital in Haifa. As for the concept of “a school with a community-orientation” - this phrase expressed my outlook on the health system in the country, a view that to no small measure had been forged by my experience in my first years in Israel, in the Negev. The most prominent shortcoming that I saw was the existence of two health systems. There were orderly high-quality hospitals, but there also was a patchwork of low-level community services, a shortage of doctors, and much more. I considered transformation of family medicine into a recognized specialty as a top priority. Even at this time, I understood that without a revolution in medical education, this objective in medical services couldn’t be achieved. This was my point of departure, guiding all my actions regarding the character of the new medical school. My Outlook on a Medical School in Beer Sheva- 43 Years after its Founding 42 Moshe Soroka, while still director-general of Clalit, died a short time prior to the medical school opening. I was then elected director-general of Clalit. As the director-general, I signed the official agreement between Clalit and the university. 40 The Paula Ben-Gurion School of Nursing operates today as an academic nursing program within the framework of the Recanati School of Community Health Professions, which is part of BGU’s Faculty of Health Sciences. 41 The Leon and Mathilde Recanati School of Community Health Professions includes studies in nursing, physiotherapy, and emergency medicine. Today, over 1,000 students are enrolled in its undergraduate and graduate programs. 42 https://in.bgu.ac.il/en/fohs/Pages/Fohs_History.aspx Later at my invitation, he became director of Clalit’s Loewenstein Rehab Hospital, in recent years heading Loewenstein’s research institute.

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