a hospital · IsraelSheba Medical Center

Israel's largest hospital: about 1,580 beds on an 800-dunam campus at Tel HaShomer in east Ramat Gan, government-affiliated and attached to Tel Aviv University. It opened in 1948 as the army's hospital for casualties of that year's war and became civilian in 1953 under Chaim Sheba. Its Global Patient Services department treats patients from more than a hundred countries.

The hospital was founded as a military institution and the inheritance shows in what it is known for: rehabilitation, trauma, post-traumatic stress, and the research units built around them.

Its published figures are unusually specific for this directory. About 1,580 beds across acute, rehabilitation and specialty hospitals; about 1,700 physicians and 12,000 other healthcare workers, with a further 1,700 staff and nearly a thousand volunteers and researchers; more than a million patient visits a year of which 200,000 are emergency visits; more than two million medical tests; a budget of 320 million dollars.

The patient figure counts VISITS. Inference — a million visits at a hospital with 1,580 beds is an outpatient system with an inpatient hospital inside it, and reading it as a million people would be reading it wrong by a wide margin.

What brings foreign patients is the cell therapy: CAR-T and tumour-infiltrating lymphocyte immunotherapy are what Global Patient Services leads with, and they are treatments a patient travels for because they are not available at home rather than because they are cheaper. Newsweek placed the hospital eighth in the world in 2025.

Israel regulates this trade directly. The Knesset passed medical tourism legislation in 2018 setting conditions on how public hospitals may treat foreign patients, after years of argument about whether a public hospital's foreign work displaces its citizens.

Foreign patients reach the hospital through Global Patient Services, which is the department the 2018 law regulates. Trade practice — a cell therapy referral runs on pathology, prior treatment records and eligibility for a protocol, not on a package: the question answered first is whether the patient qualifies, and the price question comes after.

No price schedule is published. Israel's Ministry of Health publishes the framework; the hospital publishes the department.

As of 17 September 2026 the hospital states about 1,580 beds, about 1,700 physicians, 12,000 other healthcare workers, over a million patient visits a year including 200,000 emergency visits, and patients from over a hundred countries through Global Patient Services. Newsweek's 2025 list placed it eighth in the world.