BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

We made an effort to channel the best of our doctors to the Emek, but this was not easy. Today it is easier to bring specialists there, because the hospital is associated with the Technion’s school of medicine. I have mentioned that we established the first department of family medicine in the Clalit network at the Emek Hospital, headed by Prof. Hava Tabenkin. The department was designed to serve as a family medicine specialization site for family physicians throughout the north of the country. For many years, it, indeed, fulfilled this function. Here are a few examples regarding efforts to develop the Emek Hospital and bring top physicians there: • Dr. Victor Magal was a young doctor who had arrived as a member of the program to bring doctors from South America to the Negev. He had worked at Kibbutz Be’eri in the western Negev, and after completing his period of commitment, he chose to specialize in psychiatry. He went to do so at the Talbiya Mental Health Hospital in Jerusalem. After completing his specialization, I brought him to the Emek Hospital where he established a department of psychiatry. I was a devotee of psychiatric departments within general hospitals; and I was against separate facilities for psychiatric patients, with all the stigma such isolation carries. I made Dr. Magal responsible for establishing a regional psychiatric service network that would include a hospital ward, the Omer psychiatric clinic in Afula, and a psychiatric clinic that we opened in Beit She’an, a new development town in the northern Jordan River Valley for the new wave of immigrants to the area. He directed both psychiatric hospitalization and the community psychiatric system, services that, indeed, should not be separated; and he took steps that significantly advanced mental health in the Jezreel Valley and in Afula. • Dr. Nachum Sadan, who initially went to Kibbutz Mishmar HaNegev, was among the first immigrant doctors from Argentina. He served as director of the pediatrics department at the Emek Hospital, later moving to the Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba. • Dr. Peretz Raznitzsky was a senior physician in the internal medicine department at Kaplan Hospital under Prof. Pinchas Efrati, whose department trained a host of good doctors for Clalit’s hospitals. Raznitzsky became a very successful director of the Emek Hospital’s internal medicine department. • We also brought Dr. Eran Golden, a gastroenterologist from Argentina, to the Emek Hospital. Afterwards he would become head of gastroenterology at Hadassah for many years, and today, he serves as head of the gastroenterology institute at Shaare Zedek in Jerusalem. • Another acquisition for the northern periphery was Dr. Yaakov Zilber, a young doctor and new immigrant from the Soviet Union who arrived with the first wave of Russian immigrants in the 1970s. He settled in Beit She’an where he served as a family physician. It was there, after I discovered Dr. Zilber’s talents, that I appointed him director of the Emek Hospital. Afterwards, Zilber went on to become Clalit’s director of the community medicine department at Clalit headquarters. Subsequently, he served with distinction as director of the new Carmel Hospital in Haifa until his retirement.

I also initiated the establishment of a central mechanized laundry adjacent to the Emek hospital in the Jezreel Valley, and it serviced most of Clalit’s hospital network.

In keeping with my dedication to Clalit adopting a regional district approach in structure, the Emek hospital was situated in the center of the district and, when he was the hospital director, Dr. Zilber was also director of Clalit’s regional district. In keeping with this form of organization, the out- patient clinic of the hospital was supposed to serve two functions, as the pre- and post-op out- patient clinic and as the regional district’s advisory (specialist) clinic.

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