RIYADH, 29 July — The King Khaled Eye Specialist Hospital here is offering attractive wages to Saudis willing to sign up as nurses, but response from Saudi women is not encouraging, according to a hospital official. More than 90 percent of the hospital’s nursing staff are expatriates.
“Response from Saudi women is poor due to lack of awareness about what we offer. So we have been forced to recruit nurses from Europe, Canada, South Africa, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand,” Ahmad Al-Shammary, acting supervisor general and executive director of the King Khaled Eye Specialist Hospital, told Arab News.
He was speaking at a ceremony held at the hospital last weekend, when certificates of merit were awarded to seven graduates of the Saudi Nursing Administration Program (SNAP).
The recipients of the certificates were Badr Ahmad Al-Hammad, Muhammad Mahdi Al-Ali, Hussein Hamdan Al-Shammary, Safaa Al-Saif, Hussein Ali Al-Ajeyan, Bandar Hijji Bu Saleh and Hajar Mohaed Al-Yahia.
The hospital’s continuing education program prepares Saudi nursing professionals for management responsibilities within their respective units. A total of 88 Saudis have graduated from this program since its inception in 1985.
Besides Saudi women’s reluctance to join the nursing profession, another problem was that they balked at attending the training program conducted in English, Al-Shammary said. Shortage of qualified nurses in the US had further compounded the problem draining the hospital’s recruitment sources. “They offer lucrative opportunities to Filipino nurses along with the prospects of Green Cards that give them immigrant status. So now we have to look elsewhere for our recruitment needs,” the KKESH executive said.
He pointed out that the hospital had set up a Short Stay Unit as part of its strategy aimed at faster patient turnaround. “We are now concentrating on Short Stay Unit, where the patients are operated upon and discharged within a few hours instead of requiring them to stay overnight or for one or two days. We need more nurses, because we’ll have lots of patients. Unfortunately, they are in short supply, even though we are ready to pay more.”
He observed that female patients constitute around 50 percent of the total number of patients at the hospital. “Naturally, they should be handled by female nurses. As we go through our expansion program, we would need more female nurses.”
According to Al-Shammary, Saudis have some misconceptions about the nursing profession. They are still under the illusion that a nurse’s job is to clean up a patient’s bed or administer medication at fixed hours. This and other misconceptions would be clarified through a series of seminars on this theme that the hospital has lined up for this year.
“At KKESH, it is a lot different. After all, it is a specialist hospital that has been certified six times by the Joint Commission for International Accreditation (JCIA) of the US. It is one of the few hospitals in the world to receive such an honor,” he added.
