RIYADH, 24 December 2003 — In a move to cut reliance on expatriate nurses in hospitals and clinics in the Kingdom, a national scheme for training Saudi nurses and awarding nursing diplomas to Saudi girls has been established by the Armed Forces Medical Services Department, according to Maj. Gen. Kattab ibn Eid Al-Otaibi, the department’s director general.
Maj. Gen. Al-Otaibi said here yesterday that the project had been approved by Prince Sultan, second deputy premier and minister of defense and aviation. It includes the opening of nursing diploma programs at six armed forces hospitals in the Kingdom. It is meant to serve the Kingdom’s needs for 100,000 nurses to meet the growing requirements of hospitals, health centers and clinics.
The move is intended to phase out expatriate nurses. More than 90 percent of nurses working in the country today are non-Saudis. The officials said that more nursing colleges were needed to train Saudi nurses.
Maj. Gen. Al-Otaibi said that the diploma program would be implemented first at armed forces hospitals in Riyadh, Tabuk, Taif, Khamees Mushayt, Hafr Al-Batin and Dhahran. The project will enable Saudi girls to join nursing courses in their regions, said the medical services chief, adding that further details would be announced later.
Maj. Gen. Al-Otaibi said that the national nursing project would ensure, for the first time, the availability of qualified Saudi nurses in the Kingdom. Government hospitals alone employ more than 36,200 nurses and over 21,800 paramedical staff. An official report by the Ministry of Health said recently that all of them were employed by 189 government hospitals and 1,766 primary health care centers located throughout the Kingdom. This does not include figures for nearly 4,000 privately-owned health clinics, mainly staffed by expatriate nurses.
Officials are also calling for evening courses at existing nursing colleges in order to graduate more nurses. In a related move, Prince Sultan recently provided $1.8 million to the College of Nursing and Health Science at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, USA. The money is for educating Saudi nurses.
