BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

of combining the two functions in their work – primarily various division heads who have integrated medical services with medical education and research at the same time.

The "Beer Sheva Spirit" is a concept that exists to this day. One of the elements that characterizes the school is that from the start of their studies, medical students have contact with the patient and the community, the patient’s home, social background, and so forth. I can’t forget the conversation I had with an internal medicine department head at the Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba, who later served as dean in Tel Aviv. When I asked him about Beer Sheva graduates, he told me: “When a candidate for specialization in my department comes to me from Beer Sheva, I grab him immediately because I know his capabilities in doctor-patient relations are much higher than the others.” I heard appraisals of this sort from both Beer Sheva graduates and department heads. The Beer Sheva Spirit embodies a more humanistic outlook that takes the entire patient into account, and sees the person, not just the malady. One thing I must mention: The Division for Community Health was established immediately with the founding of the medical school. In the first stage, it was based on the foundations of several different departments, including the clinical departments of family medicine and pediatrics, as well as departments such as public health, epidemiology, and medical sociology. All these departments worked together, developed research on a high par, and created the Sial Research Center of Family Medicine and Primary Medicine. But, at a certain point, content from the clinical and public health departments was separated. On the whole, our original objective was to establish a school directed towards raising the level and improving medical services in the community in the Negev. This was in marked contrast with the objective that prevailed for years in other schools of medicine in Israel which were oriented more strictly towards hospital practice. At BGU, divisions for service, education, and research in the community existed and continue to exist to this day. A downside is that BGU’s school of medicine does not have a special community-based medicine major that is designed to attract students at the outset. If one measures success in terms of the number of graduates who choose to work in the community, I am sad to say, the number who turn to primary medicine in the community among graduates of other medical schools in Israel is greater than the number of graduates from Beer Sheva. From the medical school’s earliest days, we invested great efforts to improve working conditions in community clinics so they would be suitable for students’ specialization, and we established a special unit for this purpose which was underwritten by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. We added a secretariat and social workers to the clinics. Positive strides were made in Netivot, at the time an immigrant and refugee absorption camp (ma’abara) with terrible living conditions, and in other Negev development towns, such as Sderot and Ofakim. 47 Afterwards such endeavors ran out of steam. At the outset, Professors Prywes and Glick believed nurturing good primary medicine in the community had to be built on nurturing primary internal medicine and primary pediatric medicine. I took issue with this approach. I did not believe, and I still don’t believe, that primary internal medicine can compete with the other specializations in internal medicine – cardiology, gastroenterology and hematology that are perceived to be on a higher level in the process of atomization of medicine in the current era. Today, the physician knows more and more about less and less. The physician knows more about the organ, and less about the entire patient; and such narrow perspectives are considered more prestigious and, let’s be honest, more lucrative. Of course, I am not opposed to primary

47 Ma’abarot were transit camps that dotted the landscape, rows of prefab wooden cabins (and originally tents and tin huts) provided minimum shelter during the period of mass aliyah, the absorption of immigrants that doubled the population followed statehood. They remained a ‘temporary’ feature into the early 1960s and served in many cases as the nucleus for new development towns.

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