Bothayna Murshid, consultant at the National Commission for Academic Accreditation and Assessment (NCAAA), has said that Saudi Arabia is in need of more than 142,000 nurses and that the main reason accounting for the high rate of resignation in the field is due to the low salaries offered by institutions.

At the Third International Conference on Quality Assurance in post secondary education being held in Dammam on Sunday, Murshid gave a lecture about Bridging Programs in nursing. She said, “I don’t think we have a Bridging Program plan. However, lack of coordination and cooperation between parties will not encourage the success and completion of this program.”

She asked authorities and parties to establish a common national plan to research Bridging Programs and help to accredit nurses who have diplomas.

According to the Ministry of Health’s latest statistics on nursing in Saudi Arabia, there are 40,000 female and males nurses. Murshid finds this number worrying and says that “the reason is the absence of coordination between official parties”.

She stressed that some of the nurses of the Bridging Program had graduated but that they still hadn’t been given their rights.

“The shortage of nurses is a really important issue which we must work to solve, along with other problems in the nursing field.

The Kingdom needs more than 142,000 female and male nurses so that they can be equal to other GCC countries in terms of the population,” said Murshid.

According to her, “the new order, which has led to the reduction of salaries in the nursing sector, will make it difficult to retain nurses. As a result, most nurses either quit their jobs to find another alternative or switch to administrative jobs.”