The call by the Shoura Council to privatize government hospitals has sparked a debate on the proposal's pros and cons. The people objecting say the private sector is unable to treat chronic diseases and conduct major operations such as bone-marrow transplants, which may cost millions of riyals. Those who support the proposal say privatization will improve the health sector. Muhammad Al-Ghamdi and Ali Al-Zahrani, who fully support privatization, said running government hospitals on sound scientific bases without bureaucracy will solve all the hospital problems, most notable of which is “the long waiting list”. Eid Al-Jahni and Ismail Ibrahim, who oppose the proposal, said its implementation would place a huge financial burden on citizens as shown by the attitudes of some private hospitals that do not allow patients to leave if they can't pay the astronomical medical bills. There are a number of factors related to some notable concerns about care in government hospitals, said Dr. Hesham Aldagai, an assistant professor of Clinical Pharmacy and supervisor of the Research Chair of Drugs Safety at King Saud University in Riyadh. “The long waiting lists and shortage of medicines and beds in government hospitals have different reasons,” he said. “These are common problems shared by many countries in the world, but the way they deal with them differs from one country to another.” The solution lies in assigning a scientific and applied committee at the level of the health sector, emanating from the Council of Health Services, to study the root causes of the problems and develop solutions, Dr. Aldagai said. He suggested solutions such as unifying the medical register to reduce the unjustifiable use of the hospitals and medicine by some patients, and a Ministry of Health review of procedures for procurement of medicine, due to the high cost of storage and distribution. Ministry studies show patients in the Kingdom stay in hospitals for an average of 11 days while the average in other Arab countries is five days, he said, which limits availability of beds and can increase transmissions of infections. Dr. Mohsen Al-Hazemi, a member of the Shoura Council, said there is no consensus among members about the private sector taking over the responsibility of running the public hospitals. He thinks the Ministry of Health can carry out its tasks, especially if we take into account the huge financial support it gets from the government. He said a major problem facing the Ministry is the number of faltering projects and pointed out that more than 100 hospitals are under construction, which creates a need for highly trained medical staff. Dr. Khaled Merghalani, official spokesman of the Ministry of Health, said the private sector can't handle the organization's huge range of responsibilities because of high costs of services such as organ transplants, cancer treatment and expensive procedures such as open-heart surgery. He said that as is the case throughout the world, the two sectors work side-by-side. Medication for chronic diseases such as hypertension and diabetes are dispensed through the health centers, Dr. Merghalani said, and the Ministry of Finance increased allocations for drugs after it realized that the Ministry of Health spends a large portion of its allocation on medicine. __
