Rehovot Israel (Bio)Medical: Keep Doctors, Scientists Out of the Holy Land, Jewish State

"Although the Health Ministry has been rather quiet about the trend, ministry deputy director-general for economics Gabi Bin-Nun - who headed a committee to investigate future manpower needs - recently stated that unless the number of medical students is doubled immediately, the country will soon find itself with the lowest rate of physicians per 1,000 citizens. This will constitute a "manpower catastrophe," he said. "We have asked the Prime Minister's Office and the Council for Higher Education's planning and budgeting committee to immediately approve funds for increasing the number of medical and nursing students. Nothing was done over the years because the ratio was high, but now it is clearly dropping. The population is growing and ageing, and the need for medical and nursing care is expanding," Bin-Nun says. "It takes seven years to educate a physician, and even longer to train medical specialists."

The Shaare Zedek director-general, a specialist in internal medicine and liver disease, urged that Ziv Hospital in Safed and Poriya Hospital in Tiberias become the focus of an upgrade in clinical infrastructure and manpower so they can educate the new medical school's students, who need to be exposed to a wide variety of complicated cases like those in big city hospitals. This will eventually boost the level of medicine in Galilee hospitals, he said. Afula's Emek Medical Center and the Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya, added [Jonathan Halevy], function at a good level and have less need to upgrade. Safed particularly would be a good location for the medical school and dormitories, he suggested. He also recommended that top medical school faculty members aged 60 and some years beyond pension age be offered teaching positions in the new Galilee medical school. "If they were offered homes there, they would be happy to teach there."

Even more bewildering is that around 3,000 senior lecturers and researchers who were trained in Israel are now working in the US, where they earn better salaries. Many of them went abroad for post- doctoral studies and chose to remain. "There are many Israeli doctors and medical researchers who want to return from the US, but Israeli institutions don't have anything to offer them," says Prof. Alex Keinan, a senior adviser to the Israel Academy of Sciences. "If in one of our institutions an attractive position becomes vacant," he told Zman Harefuah, "30 Israeli expatriates may apply, some of them outstanding, but only one will be hired."... [FullText]

Source: Judy Siegel-Itzkovich. The doctor is OUT Daily Edition of Jerusalem Post, Health section. (19 Aug 2007) [FullText]