BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

Bnei Barak; and Prof. Menachem Hersch, 89 a radiologist who had been at the original Hadassah hospital in Beer Sheva. Joining them on the hospital’s senior staff were others who remained in their homes in Beer Sheva’s Old City. They included Prof. Lehman, who had headed the old Hadassah hospital and came to direct one of the internal medicine departments; and Dr. Wilhelmina Cohen, 90 who had been on staff at the Hadassah facility and became director of the pediatrics department at the new hospital. I believe the close collaboration we maintained, Prof. Stern as director of the hospital and myself as Clalit’s regional medical director, served as a health enhancer for residents of the Negev as a whole. As already noted, there was a catastrophic shortage of doctors in the Negev, and it also was difficult to draw doctors to relocate there for the hospital. Beer Sheva was hardly as attractive as it is today. What did Stern and I do in collaboration? First of all, the out-patient clinic of the hospital was initially designed to examine patients prior to and post-surgery. We transformed it into a regional specialist's clinic that could provide consultation for the entire Negev, thus solving one of the most serious problems of the doctor shortage. Secondly, we appointed senior specialists from the hospital to serve in an advisory capacity for doctors in the community. With free and attractive housing, we enticed hospital doctors to live in places where there had been no doctors in the vicinity. When Prof. Josef Stern went on sabbatical, to keep our collaboration going, he appointed me, the regional medical director, to fill in as acting director for the hospital, even though it was customary to appoint one of the hospital department heads to step in temporarily. Thus, for a year I wore both hats. During that year I did everything I could to strengthen the standing and further the interests of the Beer Sheva hospital. Later, when the struggle to establish a medical school began, three department heads -- Prof. Stern, 91 Prof. Terek and Prof. Lehman -- approached me, requesting that I serve as chair of the committee entrusted with taking this struggle forward. 92 Another contribution to the health of inhabitants of the Negev was our collaboration establishing a program in Beer Sheva at the hospital for in-service training for new immigrant physicians to prepare and license them to work. The first group of immigrant physicians from Argentina was sent to Kaplan Hospital for this purpose because the Beer Sheva Hospital had not yet opened when they arrived. All the other 12 groups underwent their in-service training in Beer Sheva, where I had the pleasure of personally participating in their absorption, teaching two of the courses and sitting in on others. Despite the need to curtail development budgets during my tenure as director-general, I made a special effort to ensure that completion of Soroka Hospital’s second building would not be left in the air. Today the hospital is the primary hospital of the BGU’s medical school. They are located back-to-back on the hospital campus. Soroka is a university teaching hospital in every sense. Yoseftal Hospital in Eilat and the Sharm El Sheikh Area of Sinai Eilat had an old government hospital with a low standard, skeletal operation. From the perspective of the number of permanent residents, there was no justification for opening a “real hospital.” But there was a justification from the perspective of tourism. If one wants to develop tourism 89 Prof. Menachem Hersch (1926 -) was born in Romania and studied medicine at the Hebrew University, specializing in diagnostic radiology. He was among those who pioneered Soroka Medical Center and Ben-Gurion University’s medical school. 90 Prof. Wilhelmina Cohen (1916-2000), born in the Dutch East Indies (today Indonesia) studied medicine in Holland and immigrated to Israel in 1950. She became Beer Sheva’s first pediatrician. She founded and directed the pediatrics department at the Central Hospital for the Negev. Dr. Cohen was an associate Prof. at Ben-Gurion University and was a recipient of Beer Sheva’s 1991 Key to the City award. 91 Later, the hospital’s auditorium was dedicated in the name of Prof. Josef Stern. 92 See p. 35.

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