Four new medical schools are planned in the coming years, but the government is not even aiming to reach the OECD average of doctors per thousand population. In recent years, Israel’s academic institutions have been in a rush to open medical schools. Within the past few months, the University of Haifa and the Weizmann Institute have announced that they will open schools, joining Ariel University, which opened a medical school in 2019, and Bar-Ilan University, which did so a few years earlier, in 2012, in Safed (Zefat).
Two further initiatives await approval from The Council for Higher Education: a medical school at Reichman University in collaboration with Maccabi Healthcare Services, and an international medical school in Eilat. The target: 2,000 more doctors annually The reason that more and more medical schools are being founded now is, first of all, Israel’s severe shortage of doctors. The number of doctors qualifying from medical schools in Israel is the lowest among the OECD countries.
For years, the medical system managed to overcome that fact thanks to immigrant doctors, mainly from the countries of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, and to doctors trained overseas. In the coming years, however, the shortage is expected to worsen considerably, both because many doctors are due to retire, and because the Yatziv reforms (spearheaded by Professor Shaul Yatziv) have limited the number of institutions abroad at which medical students can obtain qualifications recogn.