BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

in an outlying area, suitable medical care must be provided. As with every medical issue during this period in Israel, Clalit volunteered to fill the bill with a cottage hospital in Eilat. 93

The Negev region covers a full third of the surface area of Israel. It stretches some 145 miles from where I lived in Beer Sheva and my headquarters there to Eilat. I remember how as regional physician I was quite often summoned to the primary care clinic of the Eilat Hospital. It was hard to entice doctors to go to Eilat. The physicians who rose to the challenge and volunteered to go to Eilat were Dr. Rafel Confino, who later specialized in family medicine and served as regional physician in Jaffa, and his wife, a pediatrician. I pondered how we could serve the city with a hospital. What doctors would volunteer to go there to grow the hospital? We mobilized doctors for a combined practice in the community and at the hospital. Each department head was responsible for their specialty in the community, augmented by a young doctor. Until development of the hospital was completed, my wife and I would go down to Eilat. We would receive an apartment for our short sojourn that was equipped, in the absence of air conditioning, with a desert cooler for comfort. 94 Not long ago, the administrative director of the hospital, Roni Mizrachi, reminded me how I convinced Dr. Edward Hardon, to come to Eilat as head of Internal Medicine. At the time, Dr. Hardon was deputy director of internal medicine at Kaplan Hospital. I went to him with a deal: “Go down to Eilat, head the department for two years, and afterwards I’ll make sure you will be department head of internal medicine at Kaplan.” He went down to Eilat, and stayed. He’s retired now. Moshe Soroka built the hospital, and in the last year or two of his life it already had five small departments: gynecology, maternity, internal medicine, surgery, and orthopedics. During my time as director-general of Clalit, we added a hyperbaric (decompression) chamber to the hospital, something that at the time only existed in Rambam Hospital in Haifa. We did so in recognition its being essential for Eilat, a popular destination for diving enthusiasts. The hospital, now named Yoseftal Hospital, is undeniably a success story. It was named for Giora Yoseftal, a member of Kibbutz Gilad near Megiddo in the north. Yoseftal was a person I highly respected for his pivotal role in immigrant absorption. He was the treasurer of the Jewish Agency at the time the hospital was opened, and later, when he was serving as Minister of Immigrant Absorption and Minister of Labor, we were very close. His wife, Senetta Yoseftal, assisted me greatly in her role as head of immigrant absorption at the Labor Federation. This included her assistance in establishing a fund for immigrant doctors’ in-service training and a fund that assisted groups of immigrant doctors to settle-in. I want to say a word about establishment of the medical clinic at Sharm El Sheikh in the Sinai, Egyptian territory taken by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. Sharm El Sheikh is a site perched on the straits at the southern end of the Red Sea, and it became a divers’ paradise. Reuven Aloni served as chief administrator of Sharm El Sheikh when the Sinai was under Israeli control; and Aloni constantly badgered me to establish a clinic at Sharm El Sheikh.

93 In Chapter 2, Doron mentions visiting a cottage hospital in Sanraer, Scotland, during the period when he was sent to study in England. These small hospitals tend to be developed in rural areas. 94 Desert coolers are devices that work on the principle of evaporation. They have pads on three sides of the device. The pads are constantly fed with water either by a refillable tank above or by a pump. When the air passes through these cooling pads it becomes colder. In the Eilat apartment the desert cooler was installed in a window frame to catch the breeze and take the edge off the stifling heat.

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