JEDDAH, 5 October 2007 — It is rare to find Saudi dentists here. Most dentists are of different Arab nationalities. The government consistently calls for the need to train and employ Saudi medical practitioners, but where are the vacancies?

“I was shocked after I graduated when I couldn’t find a job, neither at governmental hospitals nor at private hospitals — or even polyclinics,” said Dr. Solafa Ayoub, who finished her dental internship in August. She says she hasn’t found vacancies in Jeddah, and the ones she has found are in the south of the country.

Dr. Solafa said internship took her to three of the major governmental hospitals in Jeddah, all of whom filled some positions last year. “They say that after Eid vacation they would post a number of job vacancies at the university hospital, and that all we have to do is wait and hope until then.”

She said that almost all of her Saudi colleagues have had problems finding work as educated health care professionals. “We always hear and read that the country is in need of dentists,” she said. “Now that we’ve graduated and applied we’ve found no space for us.”

Dr. Nibras Al-Thaqafi finished her internship in July and is also still waiting to practice what she has learned. She said that the hospitals all seemed to have filled their quotas last year with little regards to the next graduating class.

“King Abdul Aziz University Hospital last year accepted 15 women teaching assistants (in dentistry),” she said. “They choose them looking at their academic percentage only with no thought of their teaching abilities. When I was a student, I suffered because a lot of teaching assistants do not have the ability to teach.”

Graduates are complaining that “wasta” (an Arabic term for using personal connections to achieve goals rather than going through official channels or applying meritocracy) plays a big role in graduates getting the plum jobs in the profession. Some students have said they were told that no positions were available only to hear later that somebody took a position, often a relative or a friend of a person already working at the hospital.

Some clinics are hiring temporary positions without informing the applicants beforehand that the job is not permanent. “Even small clinics ask for three or four years of experience or employ you for work in difficult shifts,” she said. “And once they have a specialized doctor they kick you out.”

Dr. Nibras suggests that there must be more planning and the government should take more seriously the concept of Saudization (the policy of replacing foreign workers with Saudis, including implementing and enforcing quotas) and start cracking down on older foreign doctors and replacing them with younger Saudi ones.

Dr. Walid Hafiz, who graduated in 2006 and finished his internship in August but is still unemployed, said most of the positions are in rural areas or faraway cities. Private hospitals, he added, seem to hire foreign workers because they can be had for smaller salaries, SR5,000 or SR6,000 a month. “Why don’t they employ us Saudis?” he asked. “We were practically trained, in our fourth year of medical school under the supervision of consultants. We need the experience.”

Dr. Hafiz, a father of a newborn, said he was once offered a two-year unpaid internship at a Jeddah hospital, an offer he couldn’t afford to accept. He advises all Saudi medical undergraduates to head directly to postgraduate studies after dental college and forget about trying to get internships in Saudi Arabia. For Saudis, it seems, the academic-requirements bar for even internships is much higher than for imported dentists.

Dr. Solafa says that almost none of the 47 women and 35 men — all Saudis — who graduated in her class have been able to land jobs. They all say that Saudization isn’t moving fast enough to meet the demands of the Saudis emerging from dental schools. And most of them also said that “wasta” was a problem.