The injured man lying on the hospital gurney screamed as the doctor poked him. The victim of a chemical weapon attack in Israel, he was at the center of a group of doctors checking his responses to a variety of experimental treatments on a computer screen.
Luckily, this patient was not going to die. He was a computerized mannequin at the Israel Center for Medical Simulation at Chaim Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer.
Among the 10 American physicians attending the Israeli “terror victim,” during a five-day training session in May, was Dr. Jason Kane, a Milwaukee pediatrician finishing a three-year fellowship at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin.
Kane and his colleagues, who represent a variety of medical specialties, have volunteered to be “on-call” doctors who would drop everything to go to Israel in the event of a national medical emergency there. They would take the places of Israeli doctors, who would then be free to serve in their military units.
In a recent interview with The Chronicle, Kane said his group trained with the Israeli Ministry of Health, Israel Defense Force and civilian doctors in preparation for that eventuality.
They also learned from doctors at Netanya’s Laniado Medical Center about how they treated the victims of the March 2002 Passover seder bombing at the Park Hotel.
Twenty-nine were killed and more than 150 were wounded in that attack.
The U.S. physicians spent another day “in Tzfat, on an army base under a Hezbollah watch tower,” near the Lebanese border, where IDF physicians and medics set up a field hospital and went to great lengths to “provide us with the kind of situations we might encounter” in a national medical emergency, Kane said.
Noting that there are lots of reasons for mass casualties, not just terrorism, Kane said he observed interesting differences in the American and Israeli approaches to some emergencies.
For example, when an American medical team has to deal with decontamination they do it on-site. But the Israelis have learned from experience that a single terror event is [often] followed by another one targeting the medical emergency workers, so their system mandates that they “scoop and run,” that is, get everyone away from the attack site as soon as possible. Consequently, their protocol is to decontaminate at the hospital entrance, Kane said.
At the end of the five days the group took the oath of the IDF medical corps, in which they swore never to leave an injured person of any nationality on the battlefield, and participated in a graduation ceremony. All are now certified by Israel’s Ministry of Health and the IDF to practice medicine in Israel.
Kane, who had visited Israel once as a tourist said, “What was striking about this trip was that I was not there as a tourist. The access we had to non-tourist based [things, such as] the Ministry of Health, military bases [and the like], was an opportunity I couldn’t have had.”
Describing himself as “not particularly religious,” Kane, 33, grew up in Chicago with a Jewish cultural identity and he said he “felt a need within myself to contribute to Israel in some way that is tangible, something more than just sending a check.”
“Looking to do some volunteer work as a physician in Israel” he came across the American Physician Fellowship for Medicine in Israel (APF). Its Medical Volunteers On-Call for Israel was just what Kane was looking for.
One result is that Kane has developed more of an interest in mass casualty management. He has since attended a training course in Chicago entitled “Fundamentals of Disaster Management.”
About five APF groups have gone for training since 2003 and trips are planned for March, May and November, 2006.
APF also plans to begin including nurses in the program, according to APF president Dr. Kel Cohen of Richmond, Va.
Cohen said he is concerned about the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the world. “If you let the state of Israel fall, your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be ghettoized again. U.S. Jews need to support Israel and supporting Israel is more than giving lip-service.”
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