High Court rejects petition to open new child cancer ward

The High Court of Justice on Sunday rejected a petition by a group of parents of children suffering from cancer, after they asked it to order the setting up of a new treatment department at an alternative hospital, instead of the facilities offered at the Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem.

The court ruling is a blow to the parents and the doctors in a bitter battle that has seen them pitted against the health minister and the administration of Hadassah, where their children are being treated.

The court also retracted a compromise framework that would have seen some of doctors who resigned from Hadassah move to Shaare Zedek Medical Center, the location parents want for the new department, as it had been rejected by all parties.

As a result, a months-long and increasingly intractable conflict appeared to have returned to its starting point.

“The suffering and distress expressed by the parents whose children struggle with this cursed disease are touching, and we are convinced that they strive to achieve the best treatment for their children,” the judges said.

“We hope that despite the legal outcome we have reached, a way will be found to extend the best medical care to the sick children, who are the ones who are at the center of the issue before us.”

The Health Ministry responded to the decision saying “in the wake of this painful chapter in the health system, we call on all parties to continue strengthening the Hadassah department so that it will be strong, professional and at the forefront.”

Following the ruling, parents said they will take apart a protest tent that they had set up in the capital’s Sacher Park. Parents appealed for donations to help cover the cost of the tent that had included beds for the children and other facilities, Channel 2 reported.

The crisis began in October, with a decision by Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem’s CEO, Zeev Rotstein, to reorganize the hemato-oncology unit in a manner which six doctors and three interns from the pediatric hemato-oncology unit found medically and logistically unacceptable. The doctors resigned in March and are being backed by most of their patients’ families who had petitioned the High Court to allow resigning Hadassah staff to transfer as a unit to Shaare Zedek, as doctors had attempted to do themselves in the early days of the crisis.

Health Minister Yaakov Litzman vehemently opposes the opening of a new department at Shaare Zedek, saying that the existence of two pediatric hemato-oncological units in Jerusalem would split resources and weaken provision of services overall.

The crisis was set off by a management plan that emerged last fall to transfer a child bone marrow transplant expert, Dr. Paulina Stefansky, from the unit without consulting Professor Michael Weintraub — who previously headed the unit before resigning in March — to an adult transplant unit in another building.

The idea was to use available beds in the adult unit to treat non-Israeli child “medical tourists” from the West Bank and East Jerusalem and countries from the former Soviet Union — who would pay high fees for transplants that would help replenish Hadassah’s depleted coffers — and have the already overstretched team from the children’s unit care for them, along with their Israeli patients in the children’s department.

Before the doctors’ resignation, the children’s department had six doctors and three interns caring for 160 new child cancer cases a year – the same size team that was caring for 120 children four years ago. The figures, according to a Channel 10 investigation, compared with 13 doctors and four trainees for 170 new cases annually in the child cancer department at Sheba Hospital, outside Tel Aviv, and 15 doctors and 5 interns for 160 new cases a year at the Schneider Children’s Hospital in Petah Tikva.

Most of the children who were being treated at the unit before the crisis erupted have moved to other hospitals in other cities at the recommendation of the doctors who resigned.

Sue Surkes contributed to this report.