Eight American visitors bounced around in jeeps until they reached a remote Bedouin village in Israel’s Negev region. There, inside a shabby lean-to, they met with a Jewish doctor and his patient: an elderly Arab man, bedridden and ill.
That delegation from the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services was in Israel last November to study the country’s eldercare system.
Earlier this month, the S.F. agency returned the favor, hosting a group from Israel.
The goal for the ongoing exchange is simple: for both sides to learn from each other.
“Israelis are always looking for the best ideas in the world,” said JFCS executive director Anita Friedman, who led the delegation to Israel and served as tour guides for the Israelis in early June. “They look for ways to further develop integrated care for the elderly of Israel.”
The 12-person delegation visiting the Bay Area included executives from JDC-Eshel and government officials. JDC-Eshel is a nongovernmental organization that develops strategies for senior health care.
Friedman showed her guests JFCS’ work, especially in the field of integrated care (providing multiple services to combat scourges of aging such as loneliness and social isolation).
“The other area we can teach them a lot is the area of palliative care, relief of symptoms and end of life care,” she added.
“We look to [America] as a thought leader,” said Israeli Dov Sugarman, program manager for JDC-Eshel.
The itinerary last November took the JFCS delegation to senior centers, medical facilities and nursing homes for various populations, including ultra-Orthodox Jews, Holocaust survivors and Bedouins.
Joining the trip was JFCS board president Nancy Goldberg.
“How we treat our elderly is such an important part of who we are as Jews,” Goldberg said. “How you make people’s lives less lonely, how you treat people who are getting dementia, how you help people stay as independent as possible [through] social mobility and social interaction — that’s a large part of what the Jewish community does in helping our elderly populations.”
For Goldberg, the highlight of the trip came during that visit to a Bedouin village.
When the delegation waked into a home, Goldberg saw a man — she guessed he was in his 90s — lying down, with his doctor attending to an infected wound.
“When he saw the doctor, his face lit up,” she recalled. “The doctor asked if it was OK if the group stayed. He said yes. We sat there while the bandages were changed. Here we were in [the Negev], where there are a lot of problems with Bedouins, but this belied all of it. It showed how things could be. I was so proud that our group was there.”
Like in the United States, the Israeli public health care system is being squeezed by government cutbacks and a fragmentation of care.
Israel does have an advantage. Because it is small, it is nimble and adaptable. “They can have one big idea,” Friedman noted, “and implement it throughout the country very quickly.”
After his Bay Area visit, Sugarman noted differences between the American and Israeli healthcare systems. “We learned a lot about flexibility,” he said. “While Israel may have a richer single-payer product, by definition it tends to be quite inflexible. We noticed a lot more flexibility here.”
However different the two systems may be, Friedman minimizes those differences.
“Human nature is the same,” she said. “We’re more similar than different. The heart of it is we share the same values about the importance of caring for the aged, of intergenerational responsibility and the importance of the family.”