BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

a terrible blow. The BGU medical school is an excellent school, but it is no longer entirely identified with its original ethos to uplift medicine in the community. I continued to give voice to this painful fact of life at every opportunity in meetings of the Goldman Committee. One day, I requested to meet with Prof. Rivka Carmi, 52 president of the university in Beer Sheva, whom I have known her since her days as a geneticist at Soroka Hospital. She came to our house in Jerusalem, and I spoke with her about the abandonment of the vision of specialization in community medicine. I asked: “Where is all this leading?” And she asked what I proposed be done. I suggested, in order to take this forward, that she recruit an outstanding professor of family medicine from Israel or from abroad. There are good candidates for this, I said. And, it is possible to offer good conditions to strengthen-retain existing staff, and thus provide momentum for developing specialization in this field in the Negev. I asked her what position they could offer such a candidate. Prof. Carmi replied that the person could be appointed as an advisor to the president for development of family medicine. Several weeks later, it came to my attention that Prof. Michael Weingarten, an excellent physician who was head of the Department of Family Medicine at Tel Aviv University might consider a change. I immediately sent his curriculum vitae to Prof. Carmi, but there was no further effort to find a suitable candidate. Today [1997] I am well into retirement and cannot do more. I imagine that a doctor of Prof. Weingarten’s stature, among the best professors of family medicine in Israel, if not the best, would have gladly come to Beer Sheva had he been offered the opportunity. But there was no initiative on the part of the BGU medical school. In the end, he volunteered to go to the new medical school in Tzfat and became one of its founders. 53 I still hold that a professor or two, specialists in family medicine with good directorial skills, should be brought on board with the objective of revitalizing family medicine in the Negev. There are neighborhood clinics that are suitable to serve as a clinical setting for family medicine specialization, and the physical plant already exists. This could be underwritten through funding from Ben-Gurion University’s far from insignificant donor sources. But one needs to aspire to realize our original vision. I don’t have the ability to externally infuse the powers-that-be with the desire to bring this change of heart about. We built a model that was copied from us at the beginning, one that today serves as a role model in many countries, while paradoxically, in Israel we have fled from realizing it ourselves.

52 Prof. Rivka Carmi (1948-), who was born in Zichron Yaakov in Israel, studied medicine at the Hebrew University- Hadassah medical school in Jerusalem. She specialized in pediatrics and neonatology at Soroka Hospital, with further specialization in medical genetics at Harvard Medical School. She directed Soroka Medical Center’s genetics institute, and became dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at BGU from 2002 2005 as well as the chair of the Israeli Association of Medical Deans. From 2006-2018, she served as president of Ben-Gurion University. She was the first women elected to the post of president of an Israeli university. In 2015, she was appointed by the Queen as Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her outstanding scholarship that deepened scientific ties between the UK and Israel. 53 Prof. Michael Weingarten (1947-2018) was born in London and came to Israel in 1973. From 1978-2011, he directed the family medicine clinic in Rosh HaAyin, a Yemenite community near Tel Aviv. He taught at Tel Aviv University where he became the head of the Department of Family Medicine and also head of the Department of Behavioral Sciences. He subsequently became one of the founders of the Bar-Ilan medical school in Tzfat.

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