Thanks to Guy Tavori and the ALL.CAN-Israel initiative, we attended a special session of the Knesset Health Committee on the challenges of closing gaps to provide quality oncology services in the periphery. The session took place as part of the ALL.CAN-Israel conference to mark World Cancer Day 2025 at the Knesset.
While protocols and recordings of committee meetings are easily accessible from the Knesset archives, there was something special about attending a session on this issue in person as representatives of the Lemonade Fund.
In attendance were several MKs representing constituents most affected by the inequalities in Israel’s underserved areas. To hear their expressions of frustration and heartfelt concern was painful. But most prominent, and perhaps most important, was what we learned from representatives from working groups charged by the Ministry of Health to come up with viable solutions to close gaps in underserved areas. Prof. Ido Wolf and Dr. Hana Shroder presented data from the Ministry’s work to map the needs across the country and recommend policies to meet those needs.
Prof. Wolf outlined the evolution of oncology care from a singly focused discipline to a truly multidisciplinary one and illustrated this with a startling statistic: 59% of all cancer treatments are delivered in four major hospitals in Israel’s central region. All within a small geographic radius: Ichalov, Beilinson, Sheba dnd Rambam (Haifa). In these centers each patient’s case is evaluated by a multidisciplinary team of oncological surgeons, oncologists, and other specialists. This is the ONLY way to optimize modern treatment protocols that require expertise in immunology, internal medicine, surgery, endocrinology, reproductive medicine and so much more.
Physicians understand this need. And as the numbers show, so do patients. The vast majority of patients from Israel’s periphery CHOOSE to travel to the center of the country. Despite the economic and social burden this places on them and on their families.
Do the tertiary medical centers in Israel’s periphery not want to provide this standard of care? Of course they want to.
To address this with one-dimensional calls demanding more money, more imaging equipment, and more affordable public transportation is only a fraction of the equation. And that’s what lies at the root of the problem.
In the committee room the “unity of concern” was poignant. But the comments and demands for more (of everything), alongside the long and disappointing record of healthcare policy failure in periphery communities, do not bode well for a “unity of solution.” Because as Prof. Wolf so eloquently explained: this is not a problem that more money can solve alone. More physician positions also is not enough. Nor more buses or trains or parking spots in the train stations!
It requires finding integrated, seamless ways to allocate the precious resources of the multidisciplinary centers across the entire country. It requires out of the box solutions to work together, not populistic ones, to bring this expertise to the treatment rooms in Israel’s north and south. The work the Planning and Strategy Division is doing to map these resources is vital. But the real battle will be in finding consensus to implement their recommendations. That rise above politics, egos and populism.
That’s the “unity of solution” the Lemonade Fund and other NGOs in the ALL.CAN community strive for. That our work will become less vital to the health and well-being of so many.
