The Council for Higher Education voted yesterday in favor of setting up a three-year pre-clinical medical school in Eilat. It has not yet decided whether this will be an international school, who will run it, and whether it will eventually be expanded into a six-year school. The Eilat municipality will be allowed to involve an international university in the running of the medical school, but, under yesterday’s decision, if an Israeli university is interested in doing so, it will be given preference.
The idea of a medical school in Eilat is the initiative of Dr. Moshe Cohen, CEO of the Medical Doctor International Academy, which supports medical students who study overseas. Cohen’s dream is to keep these students in Israel, to strengthen medical services in Eilat and the south, and to bring to Israel foreign students, an important component of the plan as far as its economic viability is concerned, as the medical school will be a private one. It will be run academically by a strong overseas medical school (for example Charles University in the Czech Republic), and clinical training will take place in the community and in the hospitals of Clalit Medical Services, which has already declared its support for the project.
The idea ran into opposition stemming from the questions whether Yoseftal Hospital and the Clalit clinics in Eilat were of a sufficiently high standard to train doctors, whether the medical school could attract sufficiently good lecturers from central Israel, whether it was possible, or even right, to bring foreign students to the school, and whether the students would not be cut off from a university environment in a way that would impair their training.
Only a few years ago, all programs for training foreign medical students in Israel were cancelled. The decision was made in order to keep medical studies, especially clinical fields, available for Israeli students. For his part, Cohen says that, in his plan, the foreign students will undergo clinical training overseas, and not in clinical fields in Israel at the expense of local students. At present it is not at all clear whether it will be possible to attract foreign students to Israel.
As far as the standard of Yoseftal Hospital and the ability to attract lecturers to the medical school are concerned, Cohen sees these things as complementary. He believes that he will be able to give doctors, mainly those who have recently retired from the medical system, or even young doctors who will have a unique opportunity to teach, an attractive package consisting of teaching, and work at Yoseftal for a few days a week, thus upgrading the hospital in parallel to the activity of the medical school. "These things must develop side by side," he says.
Competing with Cohen is a project of Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheva, which proposes to transfer some of its pre-clinical medical studies to Eilat, while clinical studies will take place at Ben Gurion University and clinical training will be at Soroka Hospital in Beersheva or Assuta Hospital in Ashdod, as at present. This is an easier project to carry out, and it does not arouse the objections mentioned previously, but its impact on the city of Eilat will be lower.
Eilat mayor Eli Lankri supports Cohen’s plan, and sees it as part of an even more ambitious plan in the medical sphere that includes a large rehabilitation center, and a leading plastic surgery clinic that will encourage medical tourism. Eilat is currently medically disadvantaged, and life expectancy in the city is among the lowest in Israel, among other things because of low access to complex medical services.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 10, 2025.
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