There isn’t a single Hollywood agent, producer or public relations “spin doctor” who could conceive of a more fascinating reality TV or movie concept than what Dr. Orna Blondheim — Israel’s first and only female director of a major hospital — lives and breathes on a daily basis. Think “ER” meets “Armageddon” … literally.
Blondheim is the director of Emek Medical Center in Afula, a growing Israeli city in the lower Galilee near Nazareth (a major Christian Arab city), Jenin (the Palestinian Authority town that has produced numerous suicide bombers) and Megiddo (the ancient Jewish biblical site).
Most of the time, this is a tranquil, picturesque piece of Middle Eastern geography where Jews and Arabs actually live and work together in harmony. However, the grim and sometimes surrealistic state-of-affairs in the region have not spared Blondheim’s Jewish and Arab staff from dealing with the chilling realities of war.
At any given moment, she might have to interrupt a meeting and race to observe one of the hospital’s Israeli Arab surgeons feverishly trying to save the life of Jewish victim of Palestinian terrorism, or advising a Jewish emergency room physician as she tends to a seriously ill Palestinian child from Jenin.
“Everyone is treated here equally. People leave their political views at the door because our teams of doctors are mixed,” Blondheim stressed.
Because Emek Medical Center is located some 50 to 75 miles away from the main media hubs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, it does not receive the accolades for the miraculous work it performs, sometimes under extreme physical and fiscal duress. However, Blondheim, who grew up and worked in several big city hospital environments both in Israel and the United States, wouldn’t change a thing. In fact, she is perhaps one of the last, honest-to-goodness Jewish pioneers, reveling in the beauty and sanctity of the Galilee, as well as the challenge to offer high-quality, big city-style medical services to a diverse and growing population.
Blondheim, who spent 20 years living and working in Jerusalem, including a stint as a pediatrician at Shaare Zedek Medical Center, and two years as a pediatrician-neonatalogist in the infant intensive-care unit at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, picked up and left the Holy City with her New York-born husband, David (a well-known cardiologist) and helped found Mitzpeh Netufa, a small religious settlement inside the Green Line in the heart of the Galilee.
“We lived in a caravan for six years and many people thought we were crazy, because it wasn’t the politically correct thing to do at the time. But my husband and I were looking for two things in our lives, to help increase the Jewish presence and raise our four children in the Galilee, and the challenge to practice medicine in the periphery, in places where we would be really needed,” Blondheim said.
The challenge to practice inner-city medicine in a country-like atmosphere presented itself at Emek Medical Center, one of Israel’s oldest facilities. Blondheim joined the staff as a neonatalogist and rapidly garnered a reputation as a forward thinker. Several years later, when the director of center asked Blondheim to become the hospital’s deputy director, she was presented with the opportunity of a lifetime.
Blondheim made the transition from caring pediatrician-neonatalogist to skillful hospital executive with relative ease. The executives at Clalit (Israel’s largest HMO, which owns Emek Medical Center) also believed that Blondheim would be a strong contender to take over a major hospital one day, but they didn’t have Emek in mind. They surmised that with her background in children’s medicine, Blondheim might be the perfect candidate to helm Schneider Children’s Hospital, the country’s newest facility, in Petach Tikvah (near Tel Aviv).
“Schneider Children’s Hospital is the diamond in the crown of Israeli medicine, a full hospital with all of the specialties, and as a pediatrician to be a director of such a facility would represent an amazing challenge, but I really didn’t want to leave Emek, which I considered home,” Blondheim said. However, the reality of becoming Israel’s first female director of a major medical center was an overwhelming inducement to leave Emek, which she did in 2002.
Just as she was settling into her new position at Schneider Children’s Hospital, the director of Emek Medical Center accepted the position as Clalit’s chief executive, which meant that a strange twist of fate opened the door to opportunity. By the spring of 2003, she returned home to Emek.
She is currently involved in pushing two parallel agendas for the medical center: prodding the Israeli government to invest in the region and raising a minimum of $50 million in the next few years in order to expand the hospital’s varied services.
“I came back to Emek because the people of the region are deprived of high-quality medicine. Yes, we have terrific physicians here, but they deserve to have the same access to specialized medicine as the average medical center offers to patients in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv,” Blondheim said. “I also told the health minister that if the government of Israel wants to bring more Jews to northern Israel, then they are going to have to create jobs, better education and increased medical services.”
Understanding that her master plan to remake Emek Medical Center into a first-class facility make take at least a decade or more, Blondheim is setting priorities based on the immediate needs of the nearby population.
“We’re always looking for major donors, because it will probably take between $50 million and $100 million to get the job done properly,” she admitted. “But there are three high-priority challenges that I am pushing forward as quickly as possible. We need to revamp our fertility unit, update our delivery room — at the moment it’s old and overcrowded — and we need to seriously upgrade our gastroenterology department, which has excellent doctors but not enough room or enough new equipment.”
Blondheim emphasized that she intends “to see the entire project through to its finish. At this stage of my life, no other job will tempt me. I’ve achieved my dream and now it’s time to actually make them come true.”