BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

The Ministry of Health’s projects committee had the role of approving all plans for any new department or new hospital in Israel. At the beginning the committee balked at approving the establishment of the Schneider Children’s Hospital. Therefore, I requested Minister of Health Shoshana Arbeli-Almozlino to do so; and she gladly approved it. She was present at the cornerstone laying ceremony, along with Schneider and his wife, and the President of the State of Israel, Haim Herzog. Concrete negotiations over all the details of the hospital’s construction and hammering out the relationship between Beilinson and Schneider took three weeks. This was carried out in a little room next to the administrative offices of the Schneider Children’s Hospital in New York. During the first stages of construction, I was still chair of Clalit. Schneider would come every fortnight to see how construction was progressing. We would meet for breakfast at the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv and talk about the plans. I can testify that he knew every single floor in the 9-story building as it took shape. In those days of media pressure and criticism, I pondered whether perhaps it would be wise to freeze the building of the upper floors of the hospital at this stage and build them later. I requested that Aviva Ron who knew one of Schneider daughters well, check this idea out with the donor. Schneider responded with wrath at the very notion, and we didn’t dare to ever raise this idea again. Construction continued, and the hospital became an established fact. Thus, out of sticktoitiveness, the first children’s hospital in Israel was born, opening in 1991. Today it operates at full throttle, ensuring high-level medical care for generations of Israel’s children. When we embarked on planning Schneider Children’s Hospital, we reduced the number of pediatric beds at Kaplan Hospital in Rechovot and Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba; and we closed the entire pediatrics department at the Sharon Hospital in Petach Tikva. All of this was in order to concentrate beds. Prof. Yitzhak Versano was a brilliant pediatrician at the Sharon Hospital. As part of the planning for Schneider Hospital, we transformed Prof. Versano’s department into a day hospitalization department. He didn’t object. The change was in keeping with his own view that day hospitalization for children was preferable to full hospitalization. Later he would establish an out- patient day unit in pediatrics at Beilinson, one of the first in the country. The Sharon Hospital in Petach Tikva The Sharon Hospital in Petach Tikva was established in a joint endeavor of the municipality and Clalit. The mayor of Petach Tikva, Pinchas Rashish, was for many years also the chair of Clalit’s national supervisory board. He envisioned a municipal public hospital in his city, and thus we established the Sharon Hospital in partnership. Although Beilinson is also located in Petach Tikva and is just a short distance from the Sharon Hospital, I viewed the Sharon Hospital as logical. Beilinson, with its specialized departments, was Clalit’s central hospital that served the entire country. By contrast, the Sharon Hospital was to be a regional hospital, solely with departments designated for a regional hospital. I considered this a good opportunity to implement my regional districts design for Clalit -- to forge one regional district out of Petach Tikva and adjoining Arab and Jewish communities. I appointed Prof. Yaakov Hart, who at the time was deputy regional director for the Negev, as director of the hospital and director of the regional district. He embraced the regional district concept completely, and Petach Tikva became one of the most successful regional districts in the reorganized Clalit system, During this period, I was being subjected to harsh media coverage. In one of the articles in the media the idea of building a children’s hospital was branded “Doron’s White Elephant”.

56