The Prime Minister's Office's extraordinary announcement last week, on the addition of budgets and hundreds of new standards of doctors, nurses and administrative staff to hospitals, was preceded by harsh and unprecedented statements made in discussions between senior government and health ministry officials.
This emerges from at least what Dr. Miki Halbertl, director of the Rambam Government Hospital in Haifa, said in recorded conversations with the directors of hospitals.
Halbertl himself was involved last week in talks and meetings with Prime Minister Bennett and members of the Prime Minister's Office, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Finance.
"You will not be elected to the Knesset"
To hospital administrators, Halbertl said in one of the discussions about the hospitals' capacity to treat hundreds to thousands of severe corona patients, "it was like a weed," he said, .
To this, the ministry's representatives replied: "If we really reach these numbers and people start dying in the street, no one will elect you anymore (to the Knesset), think what you say."
Prime Minister Bennett at Ichilov Hospital, Kobi Gideon / GPO
Dr. Halbertl further told his executive colleagues that “senior government officials have given a directive that the health care system should provide a solution to prepare for the‘ red ’scenario of 2,400 critically ill patients.
The Treasury did not want to give resources, and I told Bennett that 'you can not expect us to put up solutions and you do not give us resources'.
We went back to the first point, everyone thought the corona was over and now they say, 'Oops, we were wrong'.
Now the wards in the hospitals are tired, unlike the third wave, and even then we reached 1,200 patients and we all groaned and cried, and that was the end of the vaccinations.
I said in the hearings that we could not, today, provide a solution for 1,200 critically ill patients.
We (at Rambam) have 60 beds, and I was told we had to make 270 beds and I said I could not do that. "
"Throw us to the dogs"
Halbertl added that "there was a conversation in which Prof. Nachman Ash, director general of the Ministry of Health, was put under great pressure.
Was enough as a weed and demanded from the CEO to bring solutions to 2,400 beds for patients and I said we can not. I was told they were willing to give manpower additions, but for a month, to go through this wave.
"Nachman told me, 'Listen, we can not stand the situation where the Ministry of Health will drop this incident and cause a closure.' I also told Bennett that in the current budget the government hospitals were thrown to dogs. "To give the solution, and if I do not say so, then the doctors and nurses will rebel. Everyone is tired and I have no soldiers after me."
Treatment of Corona patients at Rambam Hospital, Michelle Dot Com
A Rambam spokesman responded to Dr. Halbertl's response: "I will not address what has been said in closed internal discussions of the Government Hospital Managers' Forum."
The Ministry of Health said that they "deny the things".
The Prime Minister's Office also denied the allegations.
