JEDDAH, 30 April 2003 — For the first time, King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Jeddah has appointed a woman as chairperson of a department. Dr. Anna Lawson, now chairperson of family medicine at the hospital, has been acting head of the department for the last year.

With a background in the UK National Health Service general practice, private health care for a major private health company in the UK, Dr. Lawson has experience coordinating private organizational concerns, health and hospital concerns, and the insurance industry.

She felt that with the general move in the Kingdom toward private health care, “It has become vital that managers and doctors alike have expertise in the private sector. I have managed to ‘slot in’ very well.”

Now on her second appointment in Saudi Arabia, Dr. Lawson previously worked as a specialist in cardiology at the King Khaled Military Hospital in Riyadh.

When she arrived in October 2000, the King Faisal Hospital was in its infancy. “I was the only female general practitioner in the hospital and we had a staff of four.” The hospital was looking for a general practitioner and Dr. Lawson had been the principal in general practice for 17 years in the UK.

“There is a demand for female doctors here. Most women, and many men, prefer women to be seen by women. Moreover, there are uniquely female medical conditions, perhaps best understood by women,” Dr. Lawson said.

The Department of Family Medicine is a primary care resource. “It is and should be the first place that a patient goes for help,” Dr. Lawson said. “There is only a very short history of general practitioners in the Kingdom.”

In 1999 only about two percent of Saudi medical students wanted to specialize in primary care. “So there was a lack of qualified Saudi specialized GPs.”

There is a widespread perception that general practitioners are failed specialists who simply pass the patient to the specialist. The idea of the oxymoronic “specialist generalist,” she feels, is one that needs to be explained.

“General practice is in fact a specialist area which requires extensive postgraduate experience. The GP looks at the whole patient and is able to approach the medical condition taking into account a multitude of factors. A lot of medicine in the Kingdom is on a crisis management basis; patients who are really ill go to hospital, get dealt with and leave again. There is no continuity of care, no holistic care. The idea of going to the same GP with a multitude of different conditions is not yet in the community. Holistic care hasn’t caught on as a concept yet.”

The King Faisal Specialist Hospital plans to extend its services through the Family Medicine Department to develop the acceptance of general practice as the first point of contact with the medical system and make it easily available to “walk-in” cash customers.

Dr. Lawson’s vision is to change the concept of primary care as it currently exists in the Kingdom. “Someone has to keep tabs on the whole person in a holistic manner, not just the isolated illness, and this is where primary care can change the whole face of the way medicine is handled here, to the benefit of the patients in general.”