From the Dean's desk
Welcome to the Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine.
Sixty six years have passed since the establishment of the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical Center in 1949. Since then we at the Faculty of Medicine have constantly strived to make significant contributions to the education of physicians and other health care providers, as well as to train generations of distinguished researchers in the medical sciences. Many of our graduates are found in all the major biomedical health care and research institutions in Israel. The mission of the Faculty of Medicine has been to instill the highest professional standards in our medical, nursing, pharmacy, occupational therapy, and public health students. All this in order to prepare them to practice patient-centered medicine, to identify and answer fundamental questions on the mechanisms, prevention and treatment of diseases, as well as to identify and provide answers to primary issues in health care delivery and in the basic sciences, all while striving for excellence.
The faculty fosters a broad range of active excellent research programs with a wide diversity of research topics and themes. On average, the Faculty of Medicine generates just over 40% of The Hebrew University's external annual research income. Its research income from external sources for 2015 exceeded $30 million. Many scientists in the Faculty of Medicine are world-renown leaders in their fields of expertise who are extensively involved in national and international collaborations, and have made major international contributions in their fields. Recent examples include research in genetics, cancer, infectious diseases, immunology, medical neurobiology, drug development and public health and community medicine. Translational research, manifested by continuous cross-talk between basic research and the clinical arena, is a major motif in these research activities.
The role and nature of the medical work is constantly changing, calling for an ongoing discussion of the way physician should be educated. The goal of the School of Medicine of the Hebrew University and Hadassah in Jerusalem is to train doctors to have wide and deep knowledge and excellent professional skills that will enable them to provide first-rate medical treatment combining humanity and compassion. In addition, our teaching program emphasizes inculcating the use of basic tools for conducting bio-medical research. In view of the anticipated dramatic changes in the nature of the medical profession, we believe that the teaching in the medical school has to focus on providing our graduates to acquire new knowledge even more than transferring the available knowledge to them. Consequently, in the past two years, we have articulated a new pre-clinical-clinical integrated teaching program. The program emphasizes the major necessary fields of study and also provides the tools for self-teaching, according to the needs of the future doctor. The changes in the new program include integrated teaching focused on problem solving and computer based learning. In addition, it allows the students to expand their knowledge in additional specific fields, such as Medical Research, Military Medicine, Public Health and Community Medicine. Implementation of the changes in the teaching program will start in the next academic year and I hope that the new program will optimize the training of our students and raise the prestige of our Medical School, Faculty and the Hebrew University
I hope you will take the opportunity to learn more about the range of study options and research programs that are available at the Faculty of Medicine at The Hebrew University and Hadassah Medical Center. I cordially invite you to contact the Faculty for more information.
