“10 Years of Training a Doctor is Too Long. The Program is Outdated, We Need to Implement AI”
Professor Anat Gafter-Gvili, the incoming dean of the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Medicine, calls for shortening the medical training path. She emphasizes the need to integrate AI tools into the curriculum.
Professor Anat Gafter-Gvili, director of Internal Medicine Department A at the Rabin Medical Center (Beilinson Hospital), will take up the position of head of the Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University this coming September. Is this appointment the peak of your career? A dream come true?
“Being the head of a medical school means being responsible for the education of the next generation of students; there is no mission greater than that. If in medicine there is the holy trinity of treating in the most professional way, teaching, and research, being a good doctor means doing all three well. It is exciting because I am going to be the head of the medical school where I studied as a student, and today my daughter is even studying at Tel Aviv University.”
So you can fix everything you didn't like. What do you dream of changing for her or for the generation that will come after her?
“One of the significant things we want is to shorten the sixth year, because in our view, the training path is terribly long. Currently, we have encountered difficulties with the Council for Higher Education (MALAT) and the Planning and Budgeting Committee (VATAT), so we haven't succeeded yet. Today there is medicine, then an internship, then a residency. By the time you become a specialist doctor, 10 years have passed. We need to find a way to reduce this duration and make the path more concentrated.”
Is it not reasonable for a doctor to be on a training path for 10 years?
“Within these 10 years as a doctor, you are already working and receiving a salary, but we definitely need to think about how to shorten the training period. We have already made changes, such as moving from frontal teaching only to online classes when possible, and we are trying to introduce content on using AI (artificial intelligence) tools into the curriculum to produce good doctors faster.”
What does that mean?
“That it is a challenge to be a doctor in this era. AI tools will not replace a doctor but will save us work in certain areas and bring good ideas. So we need to teach students to use AI tools, and they already know it better than us anyway. But we are trying to introduce AI into the study content and educate them as doctors to use them correctly and with supervision.”
It is a bit detached from reality to teach like in the old days in the AI era, even in medicine.
“The field of AI requires rethinking what is important for us to teach as doctors. We want to move from memorizing material and learning by heart to knowing how to find information and use it with a critical perspective. And yes, to harness AI for the benefit of improving learning and perhaps shortening the degree. Because in studies there are layers of knowledge, and there is the base that must be known; you cannot study a disease without understanding more fundamental layers of knowledge. So we need to find ways to learn the material, just not through rote memorization. Because the memorization component in the existing degree is very large.”
This is a test of the ability of the Council for Higher Education and the Planning and Budgeting Committee to recognize reality and compromise with it.
“Very true.”
Are you preparing to implement the law on gender segregation in academia?
“The university president, Ariel Porat, wrote his opinion; we as an academy are of course opposed. It is not appropriate, and we hope it will not happen. How can one even approach this, especially in medicine? The expectation that a doctor will treat only male patients, and that women will not treat men? It is impossible to contain such a discussion of gender segregation in medicine. I don't see how it can be maintained, and it is a very slippery slope that we must do everything to avoid.”
Ultra-Orthodox will say that this blocks the medical profession for them.
“There are a few Ultra-Orthodox in the program, and those who are accepted are helped. I am in favor of diversity but also in favor of equality. Medicine with gender segregation is a violation of the value of equality; it is simply discrimination. I cannot even imagine how such segregation can be done. Suppose in a pre-clinical class everyone sits in a lecture hall together in front of a lecturer. If there is segregation, will he lecture twice, once for men, once for women? Or only for women and men will be outside? Put a partition in the hall? During training, we put groups of 8 students into departments. So will we put only female students? And anyway, everything is mixed, and in the department, they will meet patients who are men and women. This is not a profession that works with selection, therefore it is not applicable and not appropriate. Certainly not in an enlightened country. Let's hope that such inapplicable things will not progress.”
Is the appointment to the position also a kind of reward for you, for choosing to go into a field that has no private practice?
“I am actually a proud internist (and also a hematologist); in 2015 I received the management of Internal Medicine A at Beilinson, and internal medicine is in my eyes the queen of medicine in terms of the breadth of knowledge it requires. Internal departments also hold up the hospital, in routine, wars, and even in pandemics. In every hospital, there are between 4-7 such departments. The patients are very difficult and the most interesting in my view are in internal medicine; I never for a moment feel that I compromised.”
Because your colleagues are getting rich in private practice.
“Whoever wants to be rich does not choose medicine. But you can live well as a doctor, and unlike other professions, in medicine, it is a profession where you can raise a family, there is no being called up at unexpected hours, it fits with life, you can have children, raise them without feeling that you are not accompanying them enough. The career does not prevent me from having a family life.”
It is a required international profession, and has experienced significant waves of departure in recent years.
“The number of students in Israel is constantly increasing. In Tel Aviv this year there will be 400 students, which is much more than we had in the past. This is out of the desire of the state and the Ministry of Health that there will be more doctors. At the same time, according to the Yatziv reform, graduates of institutions that do not meet the established criteria (like in Ukraine and Lithuania) will not be able to work in Israel. The need for doctors has also led to the opening of more medical schools in the country; instead of 4, there are already 9 today. I hope this will save Israelis from traveling abroad and discovering that it is better there and staying. We lost doctors who left Israel during the protests over the reform and during the war — we must do everything so that people study here, because those who study abroad sometimes do not return. Our doctors who left are coveted abroad. This is a great pride, but we must do everything so that people study here. So we need to do it here and as well as possible.”
