A name that obliges. Healthcare Poland Janusz Korczak with Sheba

Some decisions are made in offices. Others begin at a patient’s bedside. This agreement belongs to the second kind. Behind it is a question I have heard for years from parents of sick children, from doctors and from patients: why should the best medicine in the world be something Poles read about, rather than something they work with?

On 6 October 2026, the Healthcare Poland Foundation and The Sheba Fund sign a memorandum of understanding on cooperation carried out under the name Healthcare Poland Janusz Korczak with Sheba. On the Israeli side it is signed by Moshe Barak, CEO of The Sheba Fund, and Nadav Ben Yossef, Vice President for Global Affairs at Sheba Medical Center.

Sheba is the largest and most comprehensive medical centre in the Middle East. In the “World’s Best Hospitals 2026” ranking by Newsweek and Statista it placed seventh in the world — the highest position ever achieved by an Israeli hospital — and it has been in the global top ten for eight years. These numbers are not decoration. They mark the level with which, from today, we can speak directly.

Sources: Newsweek / Statista, “World’s Best Hospitals 2026”; Sheba Medical Center, “About Sheba” (as of September 2026).

Not a ward, but responsibility

The easiest thing would be to announce that Poland now has its own ward in one of the best hospitals in the world. It would be catchy — and untrue. The memorandum says it plainly: the cooperation does not create a ward, an organisational unit or a dedicated space in the hospital. Clinical responsibility rests entirely with Sheba and is governed by Israeli law. Healthcare Poland is responsible for the name — for creating it, protecting it and defending it.

I do not see this as a limitation. A patient who travels abroad for treatment needs clarity above all: who decides about their treatment, who is accountable for that decision, and where they can assert their rights. Just Culture, on which I base my work in healthcare, starts exactly here — responsibility is assigned before it is needed, not after the event. Trust can be built on that kind of clarity, and in cross-border medicine trust is a harder currency than any ranking.

Why Janusz Korczak

Henryk Goldszmit — Janusz Korczak — was a Polish Jew, a paediatrician, educator and writer. For three decades he ran the Orphans’ Home in Warsaw. In August 1942 he refused to save himself and, together with Stefania Wilczyńska, the staff of the home and some two hundred children, walked to the Umschlagplatz, from where they were deported to Treblinka. None of them survived.

His memory belongs to Poland and to Israel at the same time — and that is precisely why, in the legal sense, it is no one’s property. The memorandum says so explicitly. It is the brand “Healthcare Poland Janusz Korczak” that has an owner, and that owner is a Polish foundation.

Korczak was, above all, a doctor of children. He left a standard we would now call patient agency: a child — and every person who depends on the care of others — is not an object of concern but a person with their own dignity, voice and rights. That idea entered international law. In 1978 it was Poland that proposed drafting the Convention on the Rights of the Child at the United Nations, the work was led by the Polish lawyer Adam Łopatka, and the Convention adopted in 1989 is today recognised as part of Korczak’s legacy.

That is why paediatrics and neonatology are not just one of many areas in this cooperation. They are its heart. If, under Korczak’s name, we do not do more for sick children and their parents, the patron’s name will stop honouring us and start holding us to account.

An exchange, not a purchase

The most important thing about this agreement is that it does not describe a buyer and a seller. It describes a partnership in which both sides have something to learn from each other. The memorandum covers the transfer of clinical knowledge, professional training and joint expert work, and the parties may convene a regular scientific forum — alternating between Warsaw and Tel Aviv. Each of these areas will require a separate, detailed agreement. The memorandum opens the door. We have to walk through it ourselves.

The chance for a leap in quality does not lie in some Polish hospital appearing on Newsweek’s list tomorrow. It lies in the benchmark ceasing to be an abstraction. When Polish doctors can see how the world’s seventh-best hospital works — and show it how we work — the distance is no longer insurmountable. An exchange is real only when both sides come back wiser.

What Poland gains

Openness is not an add-on here. Poland has no dedicated law on medical tourism, so the general rules apply — freedom of economic activity, protection of competition and the transparency expected of non-governmental organisations. A foundation acting in the public interest does not close the market for a single entity. From the patient’s perspective, the greatest risk in medical tourism is capture of access by an intermediary who controls the channel and hides the costs. This architecture is designed not to allow it.

What this cooperation opens in practice

The memorandum is a framework. Its substance is the programmes already running on both sides and the patient pathway the Foundation runs on the Polish side.

Sheba’s programmes

On the Healthcare Poland side: departments for cooperation

We enter this cooperation where we see gaps in the Polish system. Each of these areas has its own department or programme within the Foundation, and a person responsible for it.

The patient pathway from Poland and Europe

The entry point is the treating physician, not an advertisement. The same pathway is open to patients from other European countries:

1. The treating physician submits a specific clinical question.
2. The Foundation checks that the documentation is complete and indicates a secure channel for transferring data.
3. Consultation at Sheba. The opinion belongs to the centre, and on the Israeli side the patient is handled by entities authorised under Israeli law.
4. The patient learns the cost and timeline before the decision, not after it. We do not promise reimbursement or funding.
5. Treatment at Sheba. Clinical responsibility rests solely with Sheba.
6. Return to the treating physician with complete documentation. Continuity of care at home is a condition, not an extra.

Operational details on Sheba’s side — service standards, data protection and settlements — will be agreed by the parties in an operational agreement.

The first model of its kind in the world — what it means and what it does not

Sheba has been building a network of international partnerships for years. Before writing about being first, we analysed the publicly announced agreements of Sheba Medical Center and Sheba Global. Four models of cooperation emerge from them.

• Sister institutions and knowledge exchange. MD Anderson Cancer Center (oncology), Mayo Clinic (technology implementation), Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein in Brazil (data, precision medicine). Each party keeps its own brand.
• Transformation partnership. University Hospital Center “Mother Teresa” in Tirana, since January 2025. A five-year rebuilding of oncology services, training and technology transfer — with no joint name.
• Agreement with a health system. PureHealth in the United Arab Emirates, June 2023. It covers clinical research, genetics, training and medical tourism — with no joint brand.
• The ARC innovation network. Including the Charité BIH ARC Innovation Center in Berlin, opened on 2 June 2026. The centres adopt the ARC model but operate as independent institutions under their own names. They do not treat patients.

Against this background, Healthcare Poland Janusz Korczak with Sheba combines four elements that we have not found together in any of Sheba’s publicly available agreements:

• a joint name in which the partner’s brand stands next to Sheba’s;
• a patron — a figure who belongs to the memory of two nations, not a trade name;
• ownership of the brand by a partner from outside Israel, a Polish foundation;
• an orderly patient access pathway that begins with the treating physician and gives no one exclusivity.

That is why we write: to the best of our knowledge and on the basis of publicly available information, this is the world’s first model of cooperation with Sheba that combines a joint brand bearing the name of a patron with ownership of that brand by a foreign partner. We say this with caution, because not all international hospital agreements are made public. If anyone points to an earlier case, we will gladly describe it. In medicine, what counts is the standard, not the laurels of being first.

Being first is not a trophy here, but a burden of proof. A model created for the first time has nothing to refer to. Each of its mistakes would become an argument against those who want to follow this path after us. Just Culture requires responsibility to be assigned in advance. Here we assign it also towards our successors: other countries and other institutions that will build a similar bridge with the world’s leading centres. That is why we set down the rules so that they can be repeated: transparent criteria, no exclusivity, clinical responsibility on Sheba’s side and continuity of care at home. A first model makes sense only if it becomes a standard.

What we do next in Poland

The memorandum opens the door, but we will measure its value by what changes in Polish hospitals and clinics. That is why we organise Healthcare Poland’s work at home along six lines.

• A network of physician-integrators. Our most important task is to build a network of physicians able to bring solutions from the world’s top ten hospitals into their own centres in Poland. This is not about one-off placements, but about people who come back with a ready protocol and know how to implement it, measure it and defend it before their team. An innovation that no one can integrate into daily practice remains a curiosity.
• Guaranteed international certification and career paths. We guarantee that taking part in exchange programmes ends with an internationally recognised certificate and has a real effect on professional development. A physician, nurse or manager who invests time in learning from the best gains a lasting, recognisable record of achievement — not just good memories.
• A faster route for innovation. We will support faster assessment and implementation of innovation in the Polish system, including through regulatory sandboxes — an area I help shape as Leader of the Regulatory Sandboxes and Innovation Support Section of GRAI at the Ministry of Digital Affairs — and through rigorous preparation of evidence for health technology assessment. The time between an effective solution and the patient is a measure of a system’s efficiency, and every unnecessary month has a clinical cost.
• A funding channel for treatment outside Poland and Europe. For technologies and protocols not yet available in Poland, we are building an orderly channel for funding treatment abroad, including outside the European Union. It is meant to operate until a given solution has been integrated into Polish practice. Where the law allows, we will seek the participation of the National Health Fund (NFZ). This is work on the system, not a promise of funding for an individual patient.
• Quality measured by outcomes. We want to bring to Poland knowledge of how Israel measures the quality of care. Since 2004 it has run a national programme of quality indicators in community healthcare (QICH), covering 69 indicators and the entire insured population across all four health funds, with results made public. Sheba, together with ICHOM, is developing a value-based approach (Value-Based Healthcare) that assesses the outcome of treatment from the patient’s perspective rather than the number of procedures performed. For the Polish system, which still pays mainly for procedures, this knowledge is of strategic importance.
• Quality to the JCI standard. Sheba has held Joint Commission International accreditation continuously since 2013. The same standard is now available to Polish hospitals through Healthcare Poland. The Foundation is the exclusive JCI-authorised and JCI-trained provider of JCI Services in the Republic of Poland, under a Collaborative Agreement with Joint Commission Resources, Inc. Hospitals interested in cooperation can prepare for the standard with us — in full or in selected elements. Accreditation is granted solely by JCI; the Foundation is independent of JCI, and the conclusion of the agreement does not constitute an endorsement of its services by JCI. More: “The currency of trust. What a Polish hospital gains on the JCI and TQAMS pathway”.

Each of these lines requires separate agreements and its own timetable. They share one criterion: the benefit must arise in Poland and for the patient treated in Poland.

How it began

It all started with one phone call. The Embassy of Israel in Warsaw introduced us to the Polish EMAS Foundation, operating under the EMASMED brand. Almost a year ago we signed a cooperation agreement with it — and since that day its team has been with us at every stage of this journey. Thanks to that support we can say with pride today that, to our knowledge, we are the first Polish institution to co-create its own brand with the world’s seventh-best hospital.

Until now, access to medicine at this level belonged mostly to those who could buy it. We did not come to shop. We came for a partnership — and that is what I am proudest of.

Korczak did not leave us instructions. He left us a measure: does the person who depends on our care feel treated as a person, and not as a task? That is the measure we are signing up to.