JEDDAH: Ten specialist health care companies from the UK concluded an exploratory visit to Saudi Arabia yesterday. The mission — led by the International Sector Group on Healthcare in London and organized in conjunction with UK Trade & Investment staff in Riyadh and Jeddah — spent five days visiting health care providers and hospitals in Riyadh and Jeddah.
“It is a small but highly focused mission that seeks to introduce cutting edge health care products and systems into the expanding Saudi market,” said Deputy Consul General and head of UK Trade & Investment Cecille El Beleidi at a reception held at the British Consulate General in Jeddah on Tuesday. El Beleidi noted that feedback concerning the mission from companies involved had been extremely positive.
Services on offer include health care buildings designed for optimum efficiency, and patient comfort and treatment from Group Dyer; environmentally friendly engineering solutions from Cundall and Johnson and Partners; and what at first sight is little more than a rubber band. The simply designed wrist tag for identifying patients was, as Graham Ball, director of Rober Limited, a prime supplier of patient wrist-tags to the UK National Health Service, explained a subtle art.
“For an adult, wearing a tag for a few minutes presents few problems. However, for children and the elderly with sensitive skins, wearing hard plastic tags can present problems and even cause injury with their sharp edges,” said Ball.
As a result, Rober has developed a rubber-soft tag that overcomes these problems and is extremely durable and secure. “It has to be,” he said. “Lose a tag and you perhaps lose track of a patient with disastrous consequences.”
Richard Hughes, head of sales and marketing for Lab21 Ltd., said identifying and monitoring medical threats was a vitally important area of preventative medicine. Lab 21’s neatly boxed kits enable transportable testing services both in major cities and in remote outlying clinics.
Able to identify many currently unmet clinical needs, including genetic predisposition, disease identification and therapy across a broad spectrum of oncological, cardiovascular and infectious disease vectors, the test kits are simple to operate and return to centralized laboratories for analysis. “By spotting and monitoring potential areas of disease of reaction to medication well in advance of it becoming serious is a vital contribution to public health,” said Hughes.
Leaving yesterday, the considered opinion of the group, most of whom were visiting the Kingdom for the first-time, was “very positive; we’ll be back.”
