A shortcut road to sustaining pain starts from the emergency room at a hospital in eastern Riyadh where ER doctors hold the patients hostage for hours. The area residents can always go to that emergency room at Yamamah Hospital, but they may never be treated at all. Industrial security personnel have taken another job of processing patients paperwork at the reception desk. The patients are then taken to a crowded waiting room where patient privacy has no place in the hospital's medical practice. The ER patients wait for around an hour to be admitted for preliminary checkup for blood pressure and temperature and one more hour with excruciating pain before they can see a doctor. “This is no longer an ER. The waiting time is horrible. I have been waiting for more than two hours to see a doctor who doesn't appear to be sitting in his clinic to receive emergencies,” said Fadh Al-Shammari, an ER patient. But those patients the security people knew had no wait at all, he added. He urged the Ministry of Health to deal effectively with the long lines problem at the ER. “We receive 500 ER patients a day, and each doctor sees between 100-150 patients,” said Dr.Ayman Badawi who works at the hospital. ER doctors have to go in and out of their clinics to see other patients in the ER, he said justifying the empty clinics. “There is nothing alarming as most cases seen are not really emergencies like flue and cough,” he added. This happens in every ER situation and things look pretty good, said Sami Al-Otaibi manager on duty. Earlier this week, Shoura member Abdullah Abu Malha objected transferring the legal authority over school medical services from the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Health, arguing that the Ministry of Health is going through a period of failure and may not be capable of bearing such a burden. – Okaz __
