Tel Aviv University Faculty of Medicine

Medical school in Israel

The Faculty of Medicine (formerly the Sackler Faculty of Medicine) is a medical school affiliated with Tel Aviv University, located in Tel Aviv, Israel.

The Sackler School of Medicine was named for Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler. The school was founded and named prior to the establishment of Purdue Pharma, the Sacklers' pharmaceutical company that was the developer of OxyContin, a version of the opioid analgesic compound, oxycodone. All three Sacklers were medical professionals who made substantial donations to the school. Each year the school has presented the Sackler Prize for a significant contribution to the fields of physics or chemistry. The school has consistently been ranked one of the 151 200 best medical schools according to the Shanghai Global Ranking of Academic Subjects.

Tel Aviv University received public pressure to remove the Sackler name from the name of the medical school due to ongoing controversy regarding the Sackler family and their alleged role in and lawsuits pertaining to the marketing and, consequently, the overprescription of addictive pharmaceutical drugs, including OxyContin. In 2019, Physicians for Human Rights–Israel said it had sent a letter to the dean of the Sackler School of Medicine requesting that the family’s name be removed. Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, a leading ethicist in Israel and ethics chairman at both Israel’s organ donation association and Tzohar, a group that reaches out to secular Jews, has publicly criticized the Medical Program for maintaining the name. The Medical school decided in 2022 to remove the Sackler name from their U. S. facing Medical Program. In 2023 the Tel Aviv University administration reached an agreement with the Sackler family to remove the name Sackler from the Faculty of Medicine.

The New York State/American Program is chartered by the Regents of the University of the State of New York and is accredited by the State of Israel. Established in 1976, the Program is taught in English and has a student population of 250. The program is open to citizens or permanent residents of the United States or Canada. The goal of the program is to provide graduates with a comprehensive academic foundation in the science of human disease and the clinical skills needed for diagnoses and treatment. Sackler strives to cultivate qualities that foster an empathetic, ethical doctor patient relationship. Its curriculum and teaching methods are modeled after those of U. S. medical schools. Classes are small. Classroom, laboratory and clinical sessions are supplemented by self study and by tutoring and seminars in small groups. Clinical clerkships begin in the third year. At the beginning of the fourth year, students take 16 weeks of electives at U. S. medical institutions. Israeli teaching institutions affiliated with Sackler include seven major medical centers, seven psychiatric hospitals, 20 research institutes and a large rehabilitation center. Graduates enter the National Resident Matching Program to secure medical residencies, much like students from medical schools in the US.