RIYADH, 15 January 2007 — Investigations are under way into the circumstances that led to the disappearance of the files on a summary inquiry into five Saudi women employees in a hospital in Riyadh, Al-Watan newspaper reported yesterday.
The inquiry was instituted following a woman’s complaint to the health minister against the five nurses. The woman said in her complaint that she found that the nurses were negligent in their duties, never punctual and were of poor moral standards.
A committee of inquiry formed by the Ministry of Health had recommended transfers and salary cuts for these nurses.
The woman who made the complaint claimed that she had been an outpatient at the nature-cure clinic in the hospital for 18 months and that her complaints were based on personal experience.
The accused hospital workers, on the other hand, complained to the governor’s office that the charges against them were contrived and baseless. They accused the ministry’s inquiry committee of unfairly treating their case because the committee never met the woman who made the complaint against them.
The committee took action against them after interrogating the doctors and workers in the clinic, the accused nurses pointed out in their grievance. They also said that even the name of the woman was forged as the hospital records showed that no woman with that name received treatment there. Neither was her name registered in any of the hospitals in the region, they said.
The files related to the case were found missing when the governor’s office ordered the police to hold an inquiry into the counter-complaints by the hospital staff. With the disappearance of the files, police could not make any progress in their inquiry, Al-Watan said in its report.
The police have demanded the Ministry of Health to make the relevant files available for investigation and the ministry says it is conducting detailed inquiries into the circumstances that led to the disappearance of the files.
The vanished files did not, however, stop the ministry from taking the recommended penal actions against the five employees, the paper added.
