JEDDAH, 3 July 2003 — A new 300-bed private sector hospital is about to open in Madinah.
“The soft opening is scheduled for the next 10 days,” Sobhi Batterjee, head of the Saudi German Hospital Group (SGHG), announced here yesterday.
The group was founded in July 1985 and has established hospitals in different areas of Kingdom supported by the Ministry of Health and official financing agencies.
“The hospital is SGH Group’s fourth in the Kingdom. The three hospitals currently operational are in Jeddah (250 beds), Asir (400 beds) and Riyadh (300 beds). The four hospitals have a total staff of 4,000. We’ve started work on our next 125-bed hospital project in Hail,” Batterjee told a press conference during a celebration to mark the signing of a contract with Siemens for supply of state-of-the-art medical instruments at the Madinah hospital.
The group also has hospital projects in Addis Ababa, Sanaa and Cairo.
“All the hospitals in the Kingdom and outside are part of our plan to have 30 hospitals employing 50,000 doctors, paramedics and administrative staff by 2015,” said Batterjee, who heads the health committee of both the Jeddah and Riyadh Chambers of Commerce and Industry.
Batterjee, who hosted a reception for a Siemens delegation, led by Erich Kaeser, chief executive officer, executive management, said the group’s present four hospitals would be involved in regular videoconferencing shortly.
Kaeser told Arab News that Siemens was continuing to train Saudis for providing back-up services to hospitals and other users of its medical instruments covering patient care and life support systems.
He said that Siemens hoped to increase the Saudization of its 1,200-staff from 250 to 400 by next year.
“Our trainees are also sent to our German-based company or to its more than a dozen manufacturing plants in the United States, Europe and other countries including Brazil and such South Asian countries as India and Pakistan.”
Kaeser believes that the company has achieved its leadership in the Kingdom and elsewhere in the world due to its quality patient care instruments including ventilators, anesthesia, cath-lab, lethotripsy, ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computer tomography (CT), and hospital information systems.
“Some of the new instruments available to the group are capable of diagnosing heart diseases including congenital heart anomalies as well as all diseases of the nervous system. Our three-dimension CT machine is capable of diagnosing calcium deposition in coronary arteries in addition to its ability to make virtual endoscopy in cases of colon and tracheo-bronchial disease,” he said.
