YOU must, Mr. Minister, be very familiar with Ghazi Al-Gosaibi’s experience in the Ministry of Health. He suffered problems when he first took the reins of the ministry, problems caused by resistance and conspiracies on the part of the enemies of change and development. I am sure you must have read his book before you took on the job since it will illuminate many a dark path and dark corner.
Mr. Minister, fortunately you came to the ministry from a working environment tied to it. Thus you are undoubtedly aware of the deteriorating level of services in government hospitals -— despite a government budget of nearly SR30 billion.
It has become next to impossible, except for influential people or those who have wasta, to find a bed in any of the government hospitals in our major cities. The shortage of medicines and the necessity for patients to pay for them have become almost standard practice, regardless of the huge amount allocated for medical insurance.
Just imagine, Mr. Minister, that some hospitals in the Makkah governorate do not hesitate to ask patients to have laboratory tests and X-rays at their own expense in private hospitals because the machines in government hospitals are not functioning. This is also true of other provinces in the Kingdom.
Mr. Minister, you must include in your schedule night visits to emergency rooms in large government hospitals. You will see for yourself that they are severely understaffed. You will also see negligence and carelessness in dealing with emergencies.
Mr. Minister, the general picture in the minds of most citizens about the Health Ministry is that it is the most corrupt and most reckless of all ministries. It is also seen as unwilling to deal firmly with medical mistakes even though its primary purpose is to protect and preserve the lives of all those living in our beloved country.
Mr. Minister, our society is full of such things as kidney failure, cardiac diseases, obesity, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma and many others. The size of the drug market in the Kingdom last year was SR6 billion although our population is about 17 million people. In Egypt, which has a population of more than 70 million, the market was at the most only SR2.5 billion. What are the reasons for such a huge disparity?
Mr. Minister, we are the only country in which people go directly to pharmacies and obtain medicines without prescriptions. We are the only country in which the income from fake and useless medicines is more than SR600 million.
Mr. Minister, your assignment will be difficult, tiring and demanding and your responsibility is huge. However, your success in separating conjoined children makes us optimistic that you can also separate the conjoined bureaucracy and corruption that are our country’s Siamese twins.
