Some 38% of respondents in a recent poll among medical professionals in Israel have indicated that they plan to leave the country at the end of their current phase of training, and one in five young Israeli doctors and medical students don’t see their future in Israel.
According to The Times of Israel, the survey of 562 physicians in training was conducted by Mirsham, an organisation representing the approximately 8 000 medical residents in the country.
The report said 38% of respondents planned to leave Israel at the end of the current stage in their training. Twenty percent they would permanently relocate, 7% would leave for a fellowship, and the remaining 11% were nondefinitive about the period away from Israel.
The newspaper reports that trainees have made up a significant proportion of the medical community protesting against the government’s highly controversial judicial overhaul plan, seeking to restricts the courts’ right to strike down government and administrative decisions based on ‘reasonableness’.
The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, passed the law in the last week of July. The Supreme Court declined to issue an injunction freezing the law but will hear arguments against the legislation from several petitioners in September.
The Times of Israel says that the exit of so many young doctors would deal a harsh blow to the Israeli healthcare system, in which a quarter of doctors are currently of retirement age. The number of active physicians in Israel, 3.3 per 1 000 population, is already lower than the OECD average of 3.6 per 1 000 population.
According to the BBC, Israeli relocation experts say that in the past few months they have witnessed a spike in business. They said push factors included the negative economic fallout of the government’s judicial changes and rising living costs.
Shay Obazanek, CEO of one major firm, Ocean Relocation, is quoted as saying: ‘We have seen a dramatic increase in the demand for information: we want to move to another country, how do we start the process?’