JEDDAH, 16 May 2007 — Health ministers of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) will discuss the state of health care in member countries at a meeting being held in Geneva today.
The 63rd session of the GCC ministerial council is taking place on the sidelines of the 60th annual World Health Assembly, which is organized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and currently under way in Geneva.
The GCC ministers in their last session, which was held in Kuwait, made a number of recommendations. Among decisions implemented this year was the World Health Survey in the GCC, which began in the Kingdom on Saturday.
The previous session also discussed a Gulf executive plan to fight diabetes and malaria. Subsequently, Abdul Rahman Al-Attiya, secretary-general of the GCC, arranged for the issue to be discussed by GCC ministers of finance and approved a budget of $47 million for Yemen to fight the illnesses over 10 years. The financing was acquired from the Gulf Secretariat General’s support fund.
“Saudi Arabia has developed services relating to first aid and family medicine. The Kingdom will soon hold the sixth Gulf conference on first aid and will invite specialists from the United States, Canada, Australia, UK and other Arab and Gulf countries,” said Dr. Tawfeeq Khoja, the director general of the executive board of the GCC Health Ministers’ Council.
“We will follow up with those issues in our meeting tomorrow. We will also discuss the issue of bird flu in the Gulf region,” Khoja said yesterday in a phone interview with Arab News from Geneva.
The 63rd session will also discuss biomedical equipment, which needs a specialist work force in addition to a special budget.
The ministers will discuss patient friendly health care facilities, which are inevitable to limit medical errors and infections. “Medical errors are on the rise in the whole world, according to the WHO. This is due to the growing habit of researchers and people to register medical and pharmacological errors,” said Khoja.
There were a total of 25,290 medical errors between 2001 and 2006 in the Kingdom; 27 percent of the cases were in the field of obstetrics and gynecology, while 21 percent were related to surgery.
Dr. Khoja added that there is a shortage of doctors in ratio to local population, something that puts pressure on doctors and affects their overall performance.
The meeting will also take up the issue of vocational health that focuses on the health of factory workers. “What is most important to achieve through this meeting is to offer better health care and modify the health regulations to serve local citizens,” Khoja added.
