Muhammad Al-Aseeri, a graduate of a technical health institute, said he and his colleagues had been working in private hospitals for the past few years but did not receive adequate salaries there.

“The average monthly salary does not exceed SR4,000,” he said.

Al-Aseeri said he had asked the manager of the hospital where he had worked for the past two years, to increase his salary. “When we saw that there would not be any improvement in our condition, we decided to resign from the hospital,” he told Arab News.

Hamad Al-Shahry, who holds a diploma from a health institute, criticized the government’s decision to send some of the health graduates to the private sector without consulting them.

“We don’t have job security in the private sector,” he said.

Most health graduates want the Ministry of Civil Service to appoint them in government institutions. “After three years of unemployment, we were surprised to hear the decision to send some of us to the private sector,” said Al-Shahry while urging the Ministry of Health to employ them in public health institutions.

In a recent announcement, Abdul Aziz Al-Khaneen, the official spokesman of the Ministry of Civil Service, said 4,000 heath graduates would be employed by the Ministry of Health, 4,000 by other health departments and 6,000 by the private sector.

“This distribution was within a royal decree issued recently to employ the graduates of the health institutes,” he said.

He added: “There is no rule preventing employees of the private sector joining government positions.”

The spokesman said the other 14,574 graduates would be absorbed later in the civil and military departments in addition to the private sector.