New in Israel’s oldest Hebrew hospital – a Young Adult Rehabilitation Department for patients over the age of 18, with 24 hospital beds.
The new Young Adult Rehabilitation Department is in addition to Herzog Medical Center’s Rehabilitation Division, which until now consisted of three departments, mainly treating elderly patients. This increases the hospitalization capacity of Herzog Hospital’s Rehabilitation Department to 102 beds.
Dr. Gilajel Morad, who specialized in physical medicine and rehabilitation at Hadassah, is the new department’s director.
“We just opened the department and it’s already approaching 100% capacity,” says Dr. Morad. “In recent weeks, young people have come to us in need of rehabilitation for various reasons, work accidents or road accidents, orthopedic problems, strokes, cancer, neurological diseases and more. During this time, we were assisted by a senior volunteer neurologist who came during the October 7th War from the United States. In addition to internists and rehabilitation doctors, the Department’s staff includes nurses, social workers and paramedical therapists (occupational therapy, physiotherapy, speech therapy and nutrition.)”
The new department is located in the rehabilitation wing of a new medical pavilion named after the late Swiss philanthropist Dr. Heinz E. Samson and his wife, Dr. Edith Samson, who donated hundreds of millions of shekels for its construction. The Wing’s rehabilitation departments are among the best equipped and advanced in the country. They are based on a Northern European model. In it, medical and paramedical activities are carried out in a comprehensive and ongoing manner throughout the day within each of the hospital’s different departments, without the need to transport patients to outpatient centers as is customary in other hospitals.
Each hospitalization department includes treatment rooms in various rehabilitation fields: physiotherapy, speech therapy and more.
In every Herzog Medical Center department, there is an occupational therapy space available for those being rehabilitated. These rooms feature a kitchen, with a wheelchair-adapted countertop and all the necessary utensils to prepare food. “For them it’s a salad, for us it’s rehabilitation,” says Dr. Haviv, CEO of Herzog Hospital.
Each rehabilitation department is planned and designed according to the highest standards of architectural excellence in order to create a calm and relaxing atmosphere which is essential to foster patients’ rehabilitation and therapeutic process.
Director of the Young Adult Rehabilitation Department
Dr. Gilajel Morad
Increasing pressure on skilled nursing in the wake of the war, “We also see heavy pressure on the complex nursing field,” says Dr. Yaakov Haviv, CEO of Herzog Medical Center.
He said: “Among other things, there are wounded soldiers who will need skilled nursing treatment, and there is not enough infrastructure in Israel to take care of them. In recent decades, skilled nursing departments in Israel have shrunk for economic reasons. In the Jerusalem area, public hospitals with skilled nursing departments (Misgav Ladach and Bikur Cholim) went bankrupt, and we, too, were reduced. About a decade-and-a-half-ago, Herzog Medical Center had five skilled nursing departments, and we were left with only one active department with 24 hospital beds, due to the deficit causing hospitalization remuneration rates set by the state for the skilled nursing field. At the same time, we are growing and working in many directions to meet the needs of the population against the backdrop of the war, and are planning, among other things, to open a large imaging institute soon.”