Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek delivers its 20,000th baby this year, breaking record

The birth marks the largest number of infants ever delivered in a single year at an Israeli hospital.

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
Shaare Zedek's 20,000 baby this year 370 (photo credit: Shaare Zedek Medical Center)
Shaare Zedek's 20,000 baby this year 370
(photo credit: Shaare Zedek Medical Center)
The 20,000th baby born at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center in 2013, and his mother, received congratulations from the hospital staff on Wednesday. The birth marked the largest number of infants ever delivered in a single year at an Israeli hospital – a number almost unmatched in hospitals around the world.
The 111-year-old hospital – which moved in 1979 from its original building on Jaffa Road to a large campus opposite Mount Herzl – became “bigger” when it got government authorization to run the financially troubled downtown Bikur Cholim Hospital, where some 6,000 babies are delivered each year (mostly to ultra-Orthodox families). Now, two out of three Jerusalem-area babies are born at Shaare Zedek, which the National Insurance Institute compensates well financially.
Due to the hospital’s growing popularity, the obstetrics and neonatal departments need to expand. A new building next to the one in Mount Herzl will be dedicated in early 2014 and include more delivery rooms, the largest neonatal intensive care unit of its kind in the country, space for parents before the babies’ discharge from the hospital, and new obstetrics wards.
Soroka University Medical Center in Beersheba was the previous champion of childbirth.