RIYADH, 22 April 2003 — The Indian Embassy has alerted Minister of Health Dr. Osama Shubokshi to various malpractices on the part of some recruitment agencies in Riyadh. The move comes against a backdrop of dwindling manpower in MOH hospitals.
A communication sent to the minister, a copy of which was seen by Arab News, said that a number of Indian doctors and nurses working at MOH hospitals in the Kingdom have been going through harrowing experiences.
The letter said the complaints against the agencies fall into five broad categories, namely contract substitution; delayed payment of salaries, overtime and other allowances; denial of vacation/final exit in breach of the contract; lack of prescribed accommodation or living facilities; prolonged retention of nurses without salaries, vacations, or arrangement for exit visas; denial, in some cases, of basic rights, including permission to visit markets for essential shopping.
As a result of the harassment, the letter said, the employees have been forced to work against their will long after expiry of the contract.
The letter said recruitment agencies are required to replace medical staff either going on final exit or on long vacation, and they dodge their responsibility in most cases to save the money required on new recruits. “This results in the incumbents being forced to continue working after the expiry of their contractual period. This has become the norm rather than an exception as the staff are sent home after many months of prolonged harassment. Not surprisingly, quite a few leave the Kingdom without waiting to collect their final dues.”
As a result of these malpractices, quite a few nurses have been obliged to leave. The situation has been compounded by an acute shortage of Saudi nurses. According to Dr. Fahd Abdul Jabbar, executive director of King Abdul Aziz Medical City, the Kingdom’s hospitals need about 100,000 medical personnel, while there are only 1,000 Saudi nurses at present. The number of expatriate nurses stands at 53,000. There is thus immense scope for the Saudization of the nursing profession.
The shortage of nurses in the Kingdom was highlighted by the fact that during the Iraq war many advertisements appeared in this newspaper regarding vacancies for nurses at the King Abdul Aziz Medical Cities in Al-Ahsa, Dammam, Jeddah and Riyadh.
At the same time, hospitals in the US were targeting candidates from Saudi Arabia. Nurses Anytime, a Dallah-based recruiting company that mainly grooms Indian nurses for placement in US hospitals, estimates the shortage of nursing staff there at 100,000. It has set up a website to attract Indian nurses to the US, especially from the Middle East, where the working environment and salaries are no longer attractive.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, an expatriate nurse told Arab News that one of the reasons for the existence of vacancies in MOH establishments is the fact that the pay for paramedical staff in these establishments is low and their increments have been frozen. These factors have created conditions conducive to the flight of medical manpower from the Kingdom to the US and Canada.
