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Medical conditions in Riyadh
We inspected 3 hospitals in Riyadh including Prince Salman Hospital
where the medical exchange program was held. From those experiences
I introduce you the conditions of the medical system in Riyadh,
an urban area. As I wrote earlier, Riyadh was a modern city with
highway networks. Therefore, hospitals were also clean and modern
both outside and inside. However, only at a few key hospitals
were equipped with expensive medical instruments like CT and MRI.
This may be true with most of the developing countries. Japanese
case with CT and MRI in any hospitals may be the exception.
The most striking thing was the composition of the medical personnel.
Most of doctors and nurses were foreigners unbelievably, so was
the other medical staff. One of the reason for this was that Saudi
Arabian people were so rich that they didn't have to work in those
days. Any Saudi Arabian citizens were given a house and pension
when they reached adulthood. Who wants to work under those conditions,
especially in the medical field which is considered to be very
hard?
Moreover, women in Saudi Arabia were not able to work because
of religious reasons. Women were not even permitted drive cars
those days.
What kind of foreigners were working there? English speaking foreigners
were working in the hospital like Filipinos and Indians who were
a majority among nurses. Indians and those from poorer Arab countries
were among doctors. Most of the doctors were specialists trained
in the U.K. or the U.S. You might think, ghow were those English
speaking doctors and nurses able to consult with Arabic speaking
patients?h It was easy. They used interpreter.
They didn't seem to feel it was inconvenient so much. Male doctors
(most of them) were not permitted to examine female patients because
of religious reasons, so female nurses examined them and told
the results to the male doctors. This way, medicine in Saudi Arabia
went on without much difficulty.
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