Table 1 Observations and Knowledge Related to Workforce Planning

• Israel knows it has shortages of physicians in certain specialties.

• Israel knows it has shortages of nurses.

• The OECD has stated that the strength of the Israeli health system is its primary care infrastructure, has predicted a growing shortage of primary care physicians, and has challenged the educational system to address this.

• Unlike the U.S., Israel does not have a cadre of nurse practitioners to help substitute for physicians.

• Medical schools are geographically distributed through the country.

• To address both a shortage of physicians and distribution of practitioners, there is a new medical school in the periphery.

• There now are financial incentives in Israel for physicians in certain specialties to train and practice in the periphery.

• The Israeli government has been urging all the medical schools to increase their class size.

• The four older medical schools seem to set their own priorities for the types of physicians they produce.

• Other than having developed plans to increase class size, a process that is well underway, none of the four older medical schools gave a clear indication it was contributing to a detailed national workforce plan.

• All Israeli medical schools have MD-PhD programs and emphasize their interest in producing physician scientists and in attracting more medical students into those programs.

o PhD’s, including MD-PhD’s are usually advised to take a postdoctoral fellowship abroad if they want to return to Israel in a faculty position.

o There appear to be no guarantees that there will be faculty positions for all who complete MD-PhD programs and do postdoctoral fellowships.