RIYADH, 1 April 2003 — The Kingdom’s Ministry of Health hospitals have only 2,500 physicians to handle 15 million emergency cases annually. Of these, only two percent, or 50 physicians, are trained for emergency care.
This bleak picture was painted by Dr. Fahad Al-Orifi, chairman of the organizing committee of the international emergency medicine symposium that opened at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center yesterday. Experts from around the world are attending the three-day symposium focusing on the management of emergency cases.
Al-Orifi told journalists an idea of the seriousness of the situation could be gauged from the fact that one of the hospitals was recently unable to cope with seven emergency cases. The Riyadh Central Hospital at Shumaisy is vastly understaffed for emergency care, with 30 physicians looking after 1,000 emergency cases daily.
There are only 14 Saudis out of 50 certified and trained physicians in this field.
There was also an acute shortage of nurses, he said. “We need 60,000 nurses, but we have only 12,000. Saudi nurses make up a small proportion of those.”
Al-Orifi said the message of the conference was that there was a need to review the emergency services in the Kingdom, especially as terrorism became a global phenomenon. Proper management of emergency services should be a priority of the Ministry of Health and other healthcare providers.
Al-Orifi quoted statistics from the Ministry of Health showing 93 million emergency visits to government hospitals during 2001, or an average of 5.2 visits annually per citizen.
The chairman said the Saudi Board of Emergency Medicine had launched a four-year training program for physicians to help them provide emergency services. The first batch of 60 participants of the course, launched in 1999, are to graduate next year.
The Saudi Board of Emergency Medicine is a centralized program in cooperation between five Riyadh-based hospitals and one from Jeddah to train emergency care physicians.
Explaining the factors behind the acute shortage of emergency physicians, he said that unlike in other countries where disaster medicine is part of the medical faculty, in the Kingdom the responsibility had been tagged on to the directorate of civil defense.
He said the civil defense directorate should develop a long-term disaster management plan and consider setting up a command-and-control system in the field. “Unfortunately, nothing much has been done so far in spite of all our discussions,” he added.
