JEDDAH, 8 November 2003 — Prince Sultan, second deputy premier and minister of defense and aviation, will inaugurate a 300-bed Saudi-German Hospital in Madinah on Monday.
The Saudi-German Hospital, the largest private health facility in Madinah, is to serve some three million citizens and residents in the region.
Sobhi Batterjee, chairman of the Saudi German Hospital Group, also disclosed plans to open SGHG hospitals in Hail, Sanaa, Cairo and Dubai and some African countries.
Dr. Khaled Batterjee, deputy chairman of the group, said the new hospital would also serve people in the neighboring cities of Sakaka, Al-Jouf, Hail, Tabuk and Yanbu in addition to millions of pilgrims.
The Madinah hospital has specialty clinics for orthopedics, open-heart surgery and neurology. It has a conference hall for 500 people to hold seminars and educational programs.
The group has signed a contract with Siemens for the supply of state-of-the-art medical instruments for the Madinah hospital.
German medical experts will visit the hospital throughout the year.
Jeddah Governor Prince Mishaal ibn Majed recently laid the foundation stone for the Batterjee College for Medical Science, the largest private medical college in the Middle East.
According to a press statement issued by the group, Batterjee has decided to invest SR1 billion to establish five medical colleges in the Kingdom.
The group has opened its first institute for nursing in Jeddah. “We are planning to establish three more nursing institutes in Riyadh, Asir and Madinah,” the statement said.
The group, which was founded in July 1985, has established several hospitals in different parts of the Kingdom with the support of the Health Ministry.
The Madinah hospital is the group’s fourth in the Kingdom. The three hospitals currently operational are in Jeddah (250 beds), Abha (400 beds) and Riyadh (300 beds). The four hospitals have a combined staff of some 4,000.
“We’ve started work on our next 125-bed hospital project in Hail,” Batterjee said. “All the hospitals in the Kingdom and abroad are part of our plan to have 30 hospitals employing 50,000 doctors, paramedics and administrative staff by 2015,” said Batterjee.
The group had earlier signed an agreement with the German Medical Academy of Stuttgart to begin academic and training cooperation for its recently opened nursing institute. The institute offers three-year courses in general nursing, physiotherapy, reception and diagnostic X-ray.
The curricula and teaching methodologies are recognized internationally.
