Israeli entrepreneurs to set up first medical center in Arab city
Entrepreneurs from the Arab city of Sakhnin are done waiting on the government and working with Tel Aviv's Ichilov Hospital to establishment a local medical facility.
The city of Sakhnin in the Galilee is one of the centers of the Arab community in Israel and is famous for, among other things, the large proportion of medical professionals who were born and raised there. It is often called the “City of Doctors,” but the shoemaker’s children are going barefoot, as it were — it’s one of the cities in Israel that lacks a hospital. The nearest medical center is in Nahariya, almost 40 kilometers (25 miles) away, a medical center that like many other hospitals in the periphery of the country, suffers from a shortage of some important medical services.
A group of Arab entrepreneurs who are residents of Sakhnin, headed by businessman Mohamed Abu Younis, wish to change this situation. The entrepreneurs, together with the Tel Aviv hospital Ichilov announced the creation of a medical center, that while small, approaches the definition of a hospital for the first time in an Arab city in Israel.
According to the entrepreneurs and Ichilov, the medical center will be 3,600 square meters large and include 14 specialist clinics in various disciplines and six operating rooms. It will also include an imaging center equipped with a CT scanner, an X-ray machine, mammography and ultrasound machines. It will have dialysis services and four surgery theaters intended for midlevel surgery, equipped with the newest technology and a recovery and outpatient department with 20 beds.
Eighty people will be employed at what will be known as Sakhnin Ichilov, all of them from the region, and there will be an arrangement with Ichilov specialists who will travel from Tel Aviv to Sakhnin for consultation and treatment of complex cases.
