JEDDAH, 26 May 2007 — A high-level committee comprising representatives from the ministries of education, health and social affairs will study the quality of services being extended to the handicapped above the age of 15, according to Prince Faisal ibn Sultan, secretary-general of Prince Sultan Charitable Foundation.
He said Crown Prince Sultan, the regent and chairman of the foundation, has already given his instructions to set up the committee after going through a report about the poor services being received by the handicapped. The report was presented by the College of Medicine at King Saud University in Riyadh.
“The committee that will include experts in relevant fields will study experiments of advanced countries and present its recommendations on how to improve various services being rendered to the handicapped, including education, housing and rehabilitation,” Prince Faisal said.
According to a recent study, disabled people in Saudi Arabia are not provided services that fulfill all of their needs. Though there are no official statistics about the actual number of disabled people in the Kingdom their number is fairly large. The study pointed out that most employers in this field are unqualified and that the model used to serve disabled people in the Kingdom is very old.
Rehabilitation centers are being criticized for many reasons. They are available only in cities, they lack specialists, they do not provide sufficient services for handicapped people and they rehabilitate disabled people away from society.
“There needs to be more research that discusses the needs of handicapped people rather than just collecting statistics about the number of disabled people and the types of their disabilities,” the study said.
Prince Faisal referred to the foundation’s services to the handicapped. It runs one of the world’s biggest centers for the treatment and rehabilitation of the disabled, which is Prince Sultan City for Humanitarian Services. Prince Sultan laid the foundation stone of the humanitarian city in 1996. The 250-bed facility with a convalescence center of 150 beds and specialized clinics can serve nearly 300,000 outpatients annually. Its surgical unit is capable of performing more than 14,000 operations a year.
The Prince Sultan Charitable Foundation is a non-profit organization established in 1995 in Riyadh. It consists of three main projects: Prince Sultan City for Humanitarian Services, Prince Sultan Program for Medical and Educational Communication, and Prince Sultan Center for Science and Technology.
All three offer rehabilitation, medical and social services for the elderly as well as for people with special needs. The foundation also contributes to the development of medical education in the Kingdom.
