Illustration
Photo: Ofer Amram
Medical students fight over internships at central Israeli hospitals
New list showing which hospitals future doctors would like to conduct their internships in reveals that a staggering majority of students prefer institutions in central Israel while almost none request to complete internships in north.
A list published of which hospitals future doctors would like to conduct their internships in revealed that a staggering majority of medical students request internships at hospitals in central Israel compared to barely any who request hospitals in the periphery.
The top two hospitals medical students wanted to complete their internships in are Sarousky Medical Center, with 169 medical students requesting to conduct their internship at the Tel Aviv hospital, and Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikva, which had 147 student requests.
There was a large gap in requests for hospitals located further away from central Israel, after the top two hospitals, Rambam hospital was the third most requested hospital with 60 students requesting it. The hospital in fourth place, Saroka Medical Center in Be'er Sheva, had 37 requests.
The requests dwindle lower and lower for hospitals in northern and southern Israel with extreme cases in the north – no medical students requested to conduct their internships at The Nazareth Hospital or the Baruch Padeh Medical Center in Tiberius.
Each hospital in Israel has a limited amount of interns it accepts and therefore the division is conducted based on a lottery. The result that not all future doctors receive their request and several of them must either move or commute to far away areas in order to complete their internships.
This year there has been a slight improvement in the process – the Health Ministry introduced a computer-based lottery which enabled students to find out which hospital they would be assigned to in a matter of minutes instead of months of waiting as was the custom up until now.
