RIYADH, 27 October 2004 — The Kingdom and Japan have signed an agreement here yesterday under which Japan will provide nursing training to Saudi girls.
The accord is in line with the commitment of the Ministry of Health to nationalize the country’s nursing sector, where 90 percent of the staff are non-Saudi.
“This project is an outcome of the cooperation between Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the Health Ministry,” said Seiichi Miyoshi, JICA resident representative here.
Miyoshi said the project would run for three years, beginning April 2005. The move is significant keeping in view the Saudi government’s plan to phase out expatriate nurses from Saudi Arabia, a country which is short of 100,000 nurses.
Miyoshi said, “Tokyo will send many Japanese experts to the Kingdom to train nurses and introduce Japanese nursing standards during the contract period.”
The agreement was signed by Miyoshi on behalf of JICA and Dr. Khaled M. Al-Hazmi, the ministry’s general director for Training and Scholarship.
As per the agreement, three sites have already been selected for the nursing project — King Saud Chest Diseases Hospital in Riyadh, King Fahd Hospital in Jeddah and Dammam Central Hospital in the Eastern Province.
Government hospitals alone employ more than 36,200 nurses and 21,800 paramedical staff.
About 90 percent of nurses working in the country today are non-Saudi, whereas over 70 percent of patients are Saudi. Hence, there is an urgent need to Saudize this sector and more nursing colleges are to be opened on a priority basis.
Plans are afoot to set up an SR100 million nursing college, which will be located at the King Abdul Aziz National Guard Medical City of Riyadh. The foundation stone of the college project, which will enroll 1,000 Saudi girls to be trained as nurses, was laid by Crown Prince Abdullah in December last year.
A national project to train Saudi girls as nurses has also been launched by the Armed Forces Medical Services Department in Riyadh on the instructions of Prince Sultan, second deputy premier and minister of defense and aviation.
Recently, Prince Sultan also provided $1.8 million to the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. The funds are being used to train Saudi students in nursing.
