Shaare Zedek gets full affiliation with HU

Hadassah hospital, Shaare Zedek's competitor, also has ties to university.

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
hospital bed 88 (photo credit: )
hospital bed 88
(photo credit: )
Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Medical Center has won a victory by getting full affiliation to the Hebrew University Medical Faculty, the same status enjoyed by the Hadassah University Medical Centers that have long been full partners with HU and regard Shaare Zedek as competition. As a result of the signing ceremony at the university on Tuesday, HU medical students may come to Shaare Zedek for practical training, and senior Shaare Zedek physicians will be invited to lecture at Jerusalem's Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School. But Shaare Zedek, which has been fully affiliated with Ben-Gurion University's Health Sciences Faculty (medical school) in Beersheba for the last seven years, will continue partnership with BGU, said Prof. Jonathan Halevy, Shaare Zedek's director-general. Shaare Zedek now has an agreement with the two universities (HU and BGU) at least for the next five years, but the affiliation in terms of academic appointments and membership and activity in faculty committees is only with HU. Shaare Zedek was only partially affiliated to HU, mostly through its internal medicine and pediatrics departments, but due to objections from Hadassah, it left and switched to BGU, when the late medical school dean Prof. Shraga Segal invited Halevy to sign an agreement. Soroka University Medical Center in Beersheba and Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon are also currently affiliated with BGU's medical school. "The new agreement means that every Shaare Zedek department will receive medical students from the HU faculty, and Shaare Zedek doctors with academic merit will get an academic appointment at the HU Medical Faculty," Halevy told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday. "Our natural place is with a faculty three kilometers away in Jerusalem and not 105 kilometers away in Beersheba But we will continue our connection to BGU." The decision will lead to an expansion of HU's medical faculty, he added, as the Council for Higher Education's planning and budgeting committee has recognized the need to train more doctors because there will be a shortage in the foreseeable future, and it takes eight years to train an MD. BGU Health Sciences dean Prof. Shaul Sofer said the move "was predictable. We signed for three years, and then it was automatically extended. There has been jealousy between Hadassah's hospitals and Shaare Zedek, as they compete in Jerusalem, and Hadassah - which is formally joined with the HU as sister institutions - did not want to give academic status to Shaare Zedek. Many Shaare Zedek doctors who teach in Beersheba told me they want to continue teaching our students, and I hope that HU will allow them to do so," Sofer said.