PM to intervene in child cancer crisis, 3 months after doctors’ resignation

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday said he was stepping in to help resolve a crisis over the treatment of child cancer patients at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital, three months after six doctors resigned from the child cancer unit in a dispute over a reorganization at the hospital.

Together with Health Minister Yaakov Litzman, Netanyahu is due to speak in the coming days with the six doctors from Hadassah Ein Kerem’s pediatric hemato-oncology unit who tendered their resignations in March.

The mass resignation, led by the unit’s director, Dr. Michael Weintraub, came after hospital director Zeev Rotstein — brought in to rehabilitate the cash-strapped organization — began a reorganization of child cancer treatment that the doctors said was conducted over their heads and that would be detrimental to the children’s care.

On Tuesday, lawmakers Yehudah Glick (Likud) and Ayelet Nachmias-Verbin (Zionist Union) sent a letter to the prime minister’s wife Sara — a child psychologist — asking her to help find a solution, the Ynet news site reported.

Several hours later, Netanyahu posted on his Facebook page that he was “sorry to disappoint” the MKs, but that his wife had asked him to intervene three days earlier.

He said he had spoken several times with Litzman since then, “with the aim of finding a solution as soon as possible.”

Sources close to Litzman confirmed that these talks had taken place.

Several months ago, Rotstein appointed a bone marrow transplant expert from the children’s haemato-oncology unit to head an adult transplant unit, in another building.

Beds in the adult unit were to be used to treat an expanded number of cancer children from overseas — so-called “medical tourists,” who pay large sums for treatment at Hadassah.

The doctors who resigned — all of whom have refused over the years to carry out private medicine — said that the existing team was already far too overstretched, that expecting them to look after tens of additional children would be medically irresponsible, even dangerous, and that the hospital was putting money before care.

The team approached the city’s rival Shaare Zedek hospital seeking to open a children’s hemato-oncology unit there where they would be employed as a group, but Health Minister Yaakov Litzman, who has sided with Rotstein to date, stamped on the idea, saying doctors could not simply leave Hadassah.

Parents of children being treated by the doctors and another three doctors in training, who have also resigned, have taken their campaign to remain under the treatment of the original medical team to a protest ‘field hospital’ tent in Jerusalem and to a highly publicized and emotional campaign.

Rotstein has brought in replacement doctors, but parents and nurses say they lack the specific expertise needed to treat a range of juvenile cancer problems.

In a recording of a meeting broadcast by Channel 2 News on Sunday, unit nurses told Rotstein that they too wanted to resign, warning that the new doctors did not have the necessary expertise to treat children and that the children were in mortal danger.

Rather than accept treatment by the new team at Hadassah, most families have reportedly been taking their children to units in the center of the country for treatment.

Nachmias-Verbin responded to Netanyahu’s post, saying, “It’s taken half a year (minus three days) for the prime minister to deal with the terrible crisis being waged at the expense of children sick with cancer.”