The Saudi Commission for Health Specialties recently compiled a blacklist of 2,443 people who were found to hold fraudulent health care certificates.
Many of them work in a private sector company, a local newspaper reported.
About 80 percent of these certificates belong to people with Asian nationalities. Only 1 percent comes from Saudi Arabia, and 15 percent belong to Arab nationalities. More than half of the fake certificates belong to people working in the nursing sector.
Spokesman of the Commission for Health Specialties Abdullah Al-Zuhian said the majority of certificates were documented at its documentation division. “With the binding directions for the documentation of both the private and public sectors, the number of applications largely increased,” Al-Zuhian said, pointing out that the commission outsourced the task to a specialized firm.
“Since the beginning of its work 20 years ago, the commission has been detecting counterfeit certificates used by employees in both the private and the public sectors,” he said, adding that there exists a mechanism for tests to define the practitioners’ qualification ahead of any other procedure in this regard.
