Increasing the number of physicians in

The Periphery

The School’s mission will also incorporate all areas of Israeli society to reflect Reichman University’s Zionist values. According to Prof. Afek, “We are proposing that the state provides grants to medical students to work in the periphery of Israel. Instead of subsidizing universities, the Ministry of Health and the Council of Higher Education would provide grants to students who will commit to work in Israel’s periphery, in this way ensuring that the peripheral areas will receive a steady supply of good physicians.”

Innovation in its methodology

“We are recruiting faculty and lecturers as well as advisory board members,” Prof. Afek shares. “We are currently working with the Maccabi Healthcare Fund and Clalit Community Division to develop a community-based approach to medicine and physical diagnosis. Hospitals nowadays are the standard for physical diagnosis, history-taking, and checkups. What we are trying to do is create an approach where the physicians are part of their community. Physicians of the future will need to be very innovative, so innovation will form an integral part of their training. They need to be comfortable with technology. The School will also boast a simulation center, a big data and virtual reality laboratory. Students will not learn traditional anatomy on corpses but will rather practice on VR technology, unlike other medical schools. It’s not that we will not have this capacity in the medical school; we will have microscopes and traditional labs. We will use them but in a more limited way; it will not be our focus. Now that we have digital histology and pathology, we do not need to base our studies on traditional methodologies.”

“We want to embrace Reichman University’s interdisciplinary approach to learning so for this reason, it is not only pre-med students that will be accepted to study medicine, but also students from other faculties, such as Law, and Computer Science and Engineering.

In June 2022, we established a Life Science program at Reichman University, which will teach the required seven courses that every student who graduates from other faculties apart from pre-medical studies or biology will take and once they pass an exam, they can become a candidate for medical school.”

The first phase of the medical school will be ready by the end of 2023. This will include the simulation centers, VR, Big Data, synthetic biology and other experimental labs that will all be housed in the Graziela Drahi Innovation Center, also due to be completed in 2023. “By the end of the year,” Prof. Afek continues, “We will have the capacity to teach medicine together with our partners, the leading medical institutions in Israel and others that may wish to join us. It is important to stress that this is not a competition with existing universities, but a proposal to collaborate”.

The next phase of the medical school will be a sevenfloor building that will provide the space for research and teaching facilities as well as a an infrastructure designed for students.

According to Prof. Reichman, “Many regard our university as a miracle under the Israeli bureaucratic system. We are determined to continue providing a unique and leading education with a strong commitment to scientific research and the needs and development of our society.”