How a French Family Held an Israeli Surgeon to Account Without Suing

Result: NIS 240,000 settlement plus a Ministry of Health finding of deviation from proper professional standards, with no claim ever filed · Timeline: 11 months · Challenge: Complaining about Israeli hospital care from Paris · Authority: Ombudsman for the Medical Professions, Ministry of Health, Jerusalem · Financial Impact: NIS 240,000

Background

A retired schoolteacher of 74, living in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, travelled to Israel for spinal decompression surgery at a private hospital that advertises in French and assigns French-speaking coordinators to patients arriving from Europe. Her daughter flew with her and stayed eight days. The surgery went ahead on the second day, a wound infection appeared on the fifth, and she was discharged on the seventh with an oral antibiotic and a follow-up appointment she was never going to keep, because her flight to Paris left the following morning. She was readmitted in Paris four days later with a deep infection that required a second operation and eleven weeks of rehabilitation.

The family's first instinct was the French one. They contacted their caisse primaire d'assurance maladie, the Conseil national de l'Ordre des médecins, and a lawyer who deals with medical accidents. All three told them, correctly, that there was nothing to be done from France. The compensation route created by the law of 4 March 2002, running through the regional conciliation and compensation commissions and ONIAM, reaches care delivered in France. The Ordre des médecins has jurisdiction over doctors on the French register, and the surgeon was not on it. Planned treatment outside the European Union is outside the reimbursement scheme almost entirely. Ten months of French correspondence had produced nothing at all when the file reached us.

The Challenge

What the family wanted was not obvious from their first letter, and separating it mattered. They wanted the surgeon's conduct examined by someone with authority over him, and they wanted the cost of the second operation and the rehabilitation covered. Those are two different systems in Israel, and running them as one is the classic mistake.

The complaints and disciplinary route is regulatory. It can find that treatment fell below standard and it can reach the licence, and it pays nothing. The Patient's Rights Law 5756-1996 builds the first rung into the institution itself: Section 25 requires every hospital and health fund to appoint a patient rights officer with a duty to examine complaints and respond. Above that sits the Ombudsman for the Medical Professions (Netziv Kvilot HaTzibur LeMiktzo'ot Refu'iyim) at the Ministry of Health, 39 Yirmiyahu Street in Jerusalem, which examines suspected departures from proper professional conduct by named practitioners in both public and private medicine. Beyond a finding lies the Physicians Ordinance [New Version] 5737-1976, whose Section 41 empowers the Minister of Health, in practice through the Ministry's Director-General, to revoke a licence, suspend it, or issue a reprimand or warning to a licensed physician who has behaved in a manner unbecoming a licensed physician or shown grave negligence in the discharge of professional duties.

The money route is a civil claim, with a seven-year limitation period under Section 5(1) of the Prescription Law 5718-1958, an expert opinion required at the outset, and a realistic run of three to five years in an Israeli District Court for a case of this size.

The obstacles were the ordinary ones for a family abroad, in an unhelpful order. The hospital's French-speaking coordinator had gone quiet after discharge and the switchboard would only take Hebrew. The medical record existed in Israel and the evidence of what went wrong afterwards existed in France, in French, held by a hospital in the 10th arrondissement. And nobody in the family could establish the one fact that turned out to decide the case: whether the mother had understood what she signed before surgery.

In Practice: Section 18 of the Patient's Rights Law 5756-1996 entitles the patient to receive the medical information held about them and copies of the record, and an Israeli institution that refuses needs its ethics committee to approve the refusal rather than a departmental decision. Israeli hospitals generally produce the file within about 21 days for a copying fee of roughly NIS 150 to NIS 200. Section 25 of the same law requires every hospital to appoint a patient rights officer, which is the rung the complaint must pass through before the Ombudsman for the Medical Professions at the Ministry of Health, 39 Yirmiyahu Street, Jerusalem, will look at it properly.

What We Did

The record came first, and nothing was written to the hospital until it arrived. A complaint drafted before you have read the file gets answered on the hospital's version of events, and there is no second attempt at the same complaint. We requested the full record under Section 18 in the mother's name, with a power of attorney signed in Paris. The apostille on that power of attorney was obtained from a French notarial chamber, which has issued apostilles free of charge since France moved the function away from the courts of appeal on 1 May 2025, a change that saves French families a step they still expect to pay for. The file arrived in nineteen days.

Three things in it mattered. The consent form was in Hebrew, unsigned by any interpreter, with no French version attached, which put Sections 13 and 14 of the Patient's Rights Law directly in issue on informed consent. The wound culture taken on the fifth day had been reported after discharge and there was nothing in the record showing that anyone read it. And the discharge summary recorded the patient as travelling internationally the next morning, which meant the decision to discharge was taken with that fact known.

We then ran the two tracks deliberately in parallel rather than in sequence. The complaint to the hospital's patient rights officer under Section 25 was filed with the record's own page references and asked five factual questions. Simultaneously, a complaint against the named surgeon went to the Ombudsman for the Medical Professions in Jerusalem, in Hebrew, with the Israeli record and a certified translation of the Paris hospital's operative note and culture results. Documents that arrive in French are read slowly or not at all; documents that arrive in Hebrew with the French original attached are read immediately.

The Paris evidence had to be assembled to Israeli expectations, which are not French ones. We obtained the second operation's report, the microbiology confirming the same organism as the Israeli culture, and a treating physician's short factual letter, translated and notarially certified.

The hospital's response to the Section 25 complaint was defensive and, on the consent point, evasive. The Ministry's examination was the lever. Once the Ombudsman opened a file on the surgeon's conduct and the hospital learned of it, the insurer's tone changed within a month. We put a settlement demand to the insurer covering the second operation, the rehabilitation, the flights and non-pecuniary damage, and negotiated over seven weeks. The full complaints structure, and its limits, is set out in our answer on complaining about an Israeli hospital or doctor from abroad.

In Practice: Section 41 of the Physicians Ordinance [New Version] 5737-1976 allows the licence of a physician to be revoked, suspended, or met with a reprimand or warning for conduct unbecoming a licensed physician or grave negligence in professional duties. Section 44 protects the physician first: written notice at least 30 days before any order, and an opportunity to answer before a committee that includes the Director-General and a representative of the Attorney General. Section 44A allows an immediate suspension for up to six months where there are grounds to suspect grave negligence causing death or serious injury, and Section 47 gives the physician three months to appeal to the District Court. None of this pays a patient anything, which is why the civil demand, worth NIS 240,000 here, was run alongside it rather than after it.

The Outcome

The Ombudsman's examination concluded that the discharge decision and the handling of the culture result departed from proper professional standards, and the surgeon's conduct was referred onward within the Ministry. Whether an order eventually issued under Section 41 is not public property, and we never made the settlement conditional on it. The point of the finding was that it existed, in writing, from a body with authority over the licence.

The hospital's insurer paid NIS 240,000 in settlement, covering the second operation and rehabilitation in Paris, the family's travel, and general damages, with the sum remitted to the daughter's French account eleven months after the first letter left our office. No claim was filed. Against a District Court action of three to five years, with expert costs and the mother now 75, the family regarded the timing as the larger part of the result.

Key Takeaways

What this case illustrates for non-residents in similar situations:

1. Your home-country complaint system stops at the border. The French route created by the law of 4 March 2002, and the Ordre des médecins, cover care delivered in France by doctors on the French register. Neither reaches an Israeli private hospital, and months spent writing to them are months lost.
2. Get the record before you complain. Section 18 of the Patient's Rights Law 5756-1996 produces the file in about three weeks for a nominal fee, and a complaint written from the record asks questions the hospital cannot answer with generalities.
3. The regulatory route and the money route are separate systems, and they work best together. The Ombudsman for the Medical Professions cannot award you a shekel, but an open examination of a named surgeon's conduct changes how an insurer values the file.
4. A Hebrew-only consent form signed by a French patient is a serious point, not a formality. Sections 13 and 14 of the Patient's Rights Law govern informed consent, and hospitals treating foreign patients often cannot show that consent was given in a language the patient reads.
5. Assemble the foreign evidence to Israeli standards early. Operative notes, culture results and physician letters from your home hospital need certified translation before they will carry weight in either an Israeli complaint or a settlement negotiation.

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Facing a Similar Situation?

If treatment in Israel went wrong and you are trying to deal with it from abroad, the first move is the medical record, and the second is deciding which of the two systems, regulatory or civil, you actually need. Very often it is both.

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