I entered a waiting room at a public hospital in Riyadh. Dozens of women were sitting on chairs, on the floor and in corridors. Some were asleep and others looked weary and bored.
After spending three continuous hours inside this room, I managed to fully grasp the situation and began sympathizing with these women.
The average waiting period for each patient is from two to three hours at the least. Waiting for such long periods of time would definitely make a healthy person sick. What must be their situation if they are already ill?
I complained to a doctor about the shortage of medical cadres in hospitals in comparison to the increasing number of patients. The situation resulted in patients waiting for long hours because of the huge number of hospital visitors and the increasing pressure on the limited number of doctors that were on duty.
Doctors are not just responsible for diagnosing patients and prescribing medication. They are also responsible for reviewing a patient’s medical file and preparing patients for checkups. This procedure wastes a lot of the doctor’s time and exhausts them. However, hospitals do not seem to want to hire more desperately needed staff.
Public hospitals are part of the basic foundation of the Kingdom’s health care system. They are one of the lucky sectors that receive the government’s direct attention. Doctors who work in public hospitals are the best and most competent doctors that the Kingdom has.
However, there seems to be a huge gap between the advanced medical professionalism of these doctors and the random organizational management that are responsible for providing these doctors the environs that they need to give their best to patients.
What is the benefit of paying high wages and offering other intensives if doctors are overworked by having to see large numbers of patients daily and if they are not provided with the facilities they need to organize their job and help them save time?
What is the use of training and graduating hundreds of qualified medical professionals if they will never be given the opportunity to practice what they have learned in the Kingdom’s hospitals?
