Why Trauma Healing Needs a New Compass: Takeaways from ICAR’s Webinar on Public Health Surveillance
- Gila Tolub
- Jul 10
- 5 min read
Since October 7th, Israelis have been living in overlapping layers of trauma—funerals, displacement, rockets, reserve duty, economic strain, and an ongoing sense of national uncertainty. But at ICAR Collective, we have also seen something else: resilience. People stepping up for each other, communities adapting, volunteers filling the void. These two realities—suffering and strength—exist side by side.
Still, the question remains: how do we move from surviving to healing? How do we accelerate recovery at the scale that this crisis demands?
On July 8th, ICAR Collective hosted a webinar on this very topic, bringing together two of Israel’s most experienced voices in public health and mental health policy:
Professor Dorit Nitzan, Director of the School of Public Health at Ben Gurion University and former WHO emergency director for the European region
Dr. Gilad Bodenheimer, a Child and Youth Psychiatrist, Director of the Mental Health Division in the Ministry of Health, and a key leader in Israel’s post-October 7th mental health response
The conversation unfolded not in abstraction, but in the thick of crisis. Dr. Bodenheimer joined the webinar while on active reserve duty. Prof. Nitzan, displaced from her home in Beer Sheva after it was destroyed by an Iranian missile, spoke to us from a university dorm room—her temporary shelter while students are away for the summer. With gentle irony, she noted that she used to be “the mother of displaced children” (who lived in a Gaza border community until Oct 7th), and now, she too is displaced.
This is the backdrop: a country still under threat, professionals working under fire, and yet a refusal to wait passively. As Gilad and Dorit both made clear—now is exactly the time to act.
“Surveillance is our compass”
The word “surveillance” often makes people uncomfortable. It conjures images of government overreach or hidden monitoring. But as Prof. Nitzan reminded us, in the language of public health, surveillance is something else entirely. It’s about direction. Focus. Clarity. It’s how we know what’s happening—and what to do about it.
“Surveillance is our compass,” she said. “It’s not just for response, but for prevention and resilience building.”
In crisis after crisis—from Ukraine to Kosovo to the south of Israel—Prof. Nitzan has seen the cost of “strategic blindness.” Without real-time data, she warned, we make decisions in the dark. We duplicate services, misallocate resources, and fail to reach the people who need us most.
Dr. Bodenheimer echoed this point. Speaking from reserve duty, he described the complexity of the current moment: multiple rounds of evacuation, therapists traumatized or displaced themselves, resilience centers under attack, and a population struggling with chronic stress. “It’s hard to heal when you don’t know what’s happening,” he said. “Without visibility, we’re just guessing.”
Guessing, we all agreed, is not good enough.
Not just dashboards—decisions
Both speakers emphasized that data is only as useful as the action it enables.
Yes, we need numbers. But more than that, we need meaning. We need systems that are built to support decision-making—not just display information. Prof. Nitzan described surveillance as “the oxygen” of emergency management. It feeds every stage: prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery. But she also warned that too often, we admire dashboards rather than use them. “It’s not enough to say the data is beautiful,” she said. “It has to help someone decide what to do.”
Dr. Bodenheimer shared concrete examples of the Ministry of Health’s evolving approach. In the past, people in distress were sent to hospital ERs. Today, thanks to lessons learned from COVID and the war, there’s a greater emphasis on remote care: teletherapy, call centers, municipal resilience hubs.
He pointed to hotline data, emergency room visits, and psychiatric medication usage as key signals the Ministry now tracks in near real-time. Each tells a story: who’s suffering, where, and how urgently they need help. He spoke of benzodiazepine prescriptions (fast-acting anxiety meds) as an indicator - the numbers rose sharply during the war but these medications can actually increase PTSD risk if overused and they are addictive.
Start with what we have
A theme that came through clearly: we don’t have to wait for perfection.
We can already use what we have—hotline usage, pharmacy data, school attendance—to paint a picture of collective wellbeing.
“In emergencies, you build systems as you go,” said Prof. Nitzan. “But even a rough picture is better than flying blind.”
Dr. Bodenheimer shared how the Ministry is working with municipalities to train local health coordinators to map community needs. In the second wave of evacuations, they didn’t repeat the mistakes of October: this time, services were deployed based on what local leaders reported in real time.
It was a reminder that data isn’t just technical. It’s relational. It depends on trust, on collaboration across systems that weren’t built to talk to each other—health, education, welfare, security. Surveillance isn’t about building a big machine. It’s about listening to the right people, in the right places, at the right time.
Collective trauma needs a collective response
Toward the end of the session, Dr. Bodenheimer addressed a deeper truth: we are not just facing individual trauma. We are living through national trauma.
“When we talk about trauma today, it’s not just about one soldier, one family,” he said. “The country itself needs therapy. Every person in Israel has been affected.”
This, he emphasized, is why public health matters. We cannot build a mental health system that relies only on professionals. There are not enough therapists. There never will be. Instead, we must build capacity in communities—training leaders, supporting neighbors, creating spaces for healing that don’t depend on clinical diagnosis.
“We used to think resilience came from specialists,” he said. “Now we understand: it comes from each other.”
Prof. Nitzan agreed. Drawing on her team’s work in remote parts of Israel, she described a grassroots model of health promotion called Karov LaBayit (Close to Home), built to strengthen local response networks. Volunteers train residents to become first responders—not just for physical needs, but for mental and emotional support as well.
This model worked during the most recent Iranian attack. “It was built after October 7,” she said. “And this time, we saw the difference.”
A closing thought
That this conversation took place during a war was not a distraction—it was the point. Both speakers were living its consequences in real time. And both made the case that now is exactly when we must invest in system-level learning.
Data is not a luxury. It’s a lifeline.
Public health surveillance, done well, helps us see who is falling through the cracks—before it’s too late. It shows us not only where the pain is, but where the healing is already happening. It’s the difference between waiting for collapse and steering toward recovery.
As Professor Nitzan put it: “We can’t afford to wait for dashboards to get updated while lives are at stake. We need systems that warn, guide, and mobilize—in real time.”
We need a compass. And we need to use it.
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