RIYADH, 31 December 2004 — Health institutes in the Kingdom are going through a rough patch and need the government’s support and cooperation to bail them out of their difficult situation.
That is the view of the CEO of a major health institute who said the government’s talk of Saudization of the health sector would remain a pipe dream unless it pitches in with a firm action plan to support health institutes, where the level of enrolment has been going down steadily.
“We want to start a course in nursing, but there is no demand for it. This profession still suffers from an image problem, which is not being tackled in terms of a public awareness campaign at the government level,” Abdullah A. Al-Ateeq, executive director of the Institute of Health Sciences, told Arab News.
Set up three years ago, the institute has a strength of 100 students, of whom 70 are self-paying and the rest sponsored by pharmaceutical firms. It offers diploma courses in pharmacy and health administration, besides one in respiratory therapy. The institute is affiliated to the California College of Health Sciences and licensed by the Saudi Council for Health Specialties.
The institute had plans for starting a course in nursing, but they had to be shelved for want of demand. Such a situation, according to Al-Ateeq, is paradoxical, since 75 percent of the Kingdom’s unemployed are women.
The Arabic daily Al- Watan reported recently that the Kingdom’s hospitals need about 100,000 female nurses and male medical personnel, while in reality there are only about 1,000 Saudi nurses. The acute shortage is being met by recruiting nurses from abroad.
Al-Ateeq said: “It is well known that during the 1991 Gulf war many foreign nurses and other medical personnel had left the Kingdom and did not return. It makes sense to rely on our own manpower, since Saudis have nowhere else to go. Yet, the government is not doing enough to encourage Saudi women to join this profession, while it has mounted various campaigns against smoking, SARS, meningitis, AIDS and other health-related issues.”
He said that it was in public interest to launch an awareness campaign for motivating Saudi women to take up nursing as a career. The sitgma attached to it could be removed by citing references from Islamic history and also by offering higher salaries to Saudi nurses besides improving their skills and overcoming any deficiencies.
The executive said another problem facing some 18 health institutes in the Kingdom is the non-availability of government hospitals to their students for internship. “We represented the matter to the ministry, but we were told that there was not enough space in public hospitals to train our students. As a result, we have no alternative but to send them to private hospitals which charge SR25 per hour. This pushes up the cost of training which many of our students cannot afford. If the situation does not improve, some of the institutes may have to close down,” he added.
He also called on the Saudi Council for Health Specialties to consider waiving its fee, which works out to almost SR 100,000 annually if the institute runs four programs.
“This is a big financial burden both for the institute and the students and it also limits accessibility to the course for the students,” he added.
