The doctor extending family practices at a global level

With a background as a family doctor, Dr Sadok Besrour and his foundation are trying to tackle health, education, and heritage. He joined Jamila Versi for a chat to tell her a little more about it – and the importance of introducing family medicine to the world. 

Dr Sadok Besrour is a busy man. Joining me for a sit-down with his daughter and his nephew, it is a joy to hear his foundation’s activities described not only through him but also through them, as one thing becomes clear – at an age of retirement, Dr Besrour is a hard man to slow down. 

“It’s an obsession,” Nathalie Bisonette, his daughter and a member of the Dr Basok Besrour Foundation, says during our conversation in London, describing the intensity with which Besrour has thrown himself into his work in recent years. 

Age, she thinks, has sharpened something in him: the awareness that time is passing, and with it the urgency to make sure that what he has spent decades building does not disappear when he does.

Besrour puts it more simply. “Give back,” he says. “That’s it.”

It is perhaps the clearest explanation for a career that, when recounted chronologically, can become difficult to contain. 

Enquiring about the family’s journey in the UK right now, I quickly get lost in the details – the trip is related both to a donation and collaboration with UNESCO and one in Oxford, but the foundation is actually based in Canada. 

His foundation covers medicine, philanthropy, and heritage. Behind these eclectic topics sits a recurring question: how do you build something that continues after you leave?

For Besrour, the answer began with medicine.

Family Medicine

Born in Djerba, Tunisia, Besrour studied medicine in France before training in Canada, where he spent much of his professional life. He belongs to an early generation of doctors who helped establish family medicine as a discipline at a time when the glamour, money and academic prestige of medicine seemed increasingly concentrated elsewhere. That imbalance still bothers him.

The family doctor, as he sees it, occupies the most important position – but also the one that is least prioritised. Family medicine does not lead to a PhD, and Besrour feels that there is a certain stigma around family medicine compared to other types of medicine. But while a specialist may encounter the heart, the knee or the nervous system, the generalist must encounter the patient.

During our conversation, cardiology becomes the recurring example of a more celebrated and specialised career – sometimes so often that the room begins joking about an “anti-cardiologist committee.”

But Besrour’s point is serious. Modern medicine has become extraordinarily good at dividing the human body into increasingly narrow areas of expertise. In the process, Besrour believes, it can lose sight of the person those parts belong to.

It sounds almost obvious. 

Yet Besrour has spent much of his career arguing that health systems have undervalued this kind of medicine precisely: the first doctor a patient encounters, the practitioner who recognises a problem early, who follows someone over years and understands illness within the wider context of a life. 

Good medicine, argues Besrour, moves towards something more holistic. 

“The doctor sees the whole person,” he argues. 

That conviction eventually expanded beyond family doctors to primary healthcare- the nurses, pharmacists and other frontline professionals capable of dealing with problems before they become emergencies. In countries where hospitals are overloaded and medical resources unevenly distributed, strengthening that first line of care is not simply a professional preference. 

It is a question of how the entire system functions.

Educating the future

But Besrour’s interest is no longer only in practising medicine. 

It is in reproducing knowledge. 

Again and again during our conversation, different areas of his work seem to return to education. If doctors need stronger primary-care systems, then train doctors and train those who will train the next generation. If a traditional Tunisian craft risks disappearing, teach it to younger artisans. 

If communities need stronger schools, support teachers as well as pupils. If an institution is to continue beyond a single donation, create an endowment rather than simply writing another check.

At one point, we discuss medical equipment Besrour has sent to Tunisia. Equipment is useful, his nephew M. Mehdi Besrour, who is also part of the foundation, explains, but it eventually wears out. Education is different. Teach someone, and the effect continues multiplying. 

That distinction reveals something important about the way the elder Besrour thinks. He is a philanthropist, but he talks less like someone interested in acts of charity than someone preoccupied with infrastructure.

The foundation’s own language makes the philosophy explicit: it favours institutions that can endure – chairs, centres, training programmes and partnerships with established organisations – over spectacular interventions that disappear once the initial money has been spent. Its work now sits across health, education and heritage, fields that initially look unrelated but which Besrour connects through the transmission of knowledge.

His medical and managerial lives seem to meet here.

After training as a doctor, Besrour later studied management in Switzerland. The experience, according to his account, changed how he approached problems. 

Medicine had taught him to think about individual patients. Management taught him to think about institutions, resources and systems. And though institutions are at times cumbersome, Besrour prefers to work with something he knows will remain. 

For years, Besrour supported an international network around family medicine in Canada. When the Canadian partnership could no longer continue in its existing form, the future of the project became uncertain. The possibility that years of work might simply stop was unacceptable.

A new home was eventually found at the University of Oxford, where the work is now being developed through the ‘Besrour Centre for Global Primary Care’. At the time of our interview, Besrour is in Britain partly to celebrate the launch of his new centre in Oxford, and because the recruitment of leadership for the centre has begun.  

Keeping the focus on Tunisia

In parallel, a related effort is taking shape in Tunisia.

This movement – from Canada, to Oxford, back towards Tunisia – mirrors Besrour’s own life.

Canada gave him the space in which much of his medical career developed. Tunisia never really ceased to be home. 

“You can live far from your homeland without ever truly leaving it,” Besrour says. It could serve as a summary of much of Besrour’s philanthropy.

His ambitions for Tunisia are not framed around importing a ready-made Canadian or British model. In the interview, he repeatedly stresses adaptation. Primary healthcare cannot look identical everywhere because countries do not begin with identical resources, institutions or workforces. 

In some places, the first task may be producing more family doctors. Elsewhere it may be strengthening nurses, trainers or academic research. “You start with what you have.”

That may also explain why the list of projects attached to his name can initially appear so eclectic.

His foundation has supported medical training and university chairs, schools and educational initiatives, and efforts to preserve Tunisian heritage and traditional craftsmanship. It helped support the work surrounding Djerba’s inscription on UNESCO’s World Heritage List and has worked with UNESCO on programmes intended to transmit endangered artisanal skills.

More recently, Besrour has also discussed support channelled through UNESCO for Palestinians, including educational and cultural initiatives and possible work addressing mental-health needs.

The details of some of these programmes were still being developed when we met, and Besrour himself was careful not to pretend otherwise. When I asked him why the Palestinian cause is so important to him, he replied, “First of all, I am a doctor.” A telling response about how he wants to shape his legacy. 

Besrour says he is largely a person who works by himself. The claim is immediately challenged by those around him. What he is actually good at, they argue, is finding collaborators.

That correction feels revealing.

For all the emphasis on the individual donor – the doctor whose name appears on the foundation, the awards and the academic initiatives – the project Besrour is trying to construct depends on making himself less essential to it.

His foundation works through other institutions. His medical philosophy emphasises teams rather than isolated specialists. His favoured model is “training the trainer”. Even his fortune, his family says, is ultimately intended for the foundation and the causes it supports.

At its heart, then, Besrour’s story is less about giving money away than relinquishing ownership of what that money begins.

Near the end of our conversation, he searches for the words to explain what satisfaction he takes from all this. He is thinking about the next generation now, he says. About moving things into a form that will allow the journey to continue.

“I think I achieved what I would like,” he says.

It does not sound very much like the declaration of a man who has finished. A few minutes later, everyone around the table is once again talking about how busy he is. Besrour appears perfectly happy with that.