Ninety percent of formal complaints against hospitals to the Ministry of Health's Patient Relations Department are false, according to the Abdul Aziz Al-Dakheel, the Supervisor General of the Department. “The number of complaints, however, has gone down in recent times to around 14 a week, compared to last year's average of 170 a week,” Al-Dakheel said. Al-Dakheel made the comments ahead of a symposium in Riyadh entitled “Handling Medical Malpractice”, gathering representatives from the ministries of Health, Justice, and Culture and Information and national newspaper editors-in-chief in the light of an upsurge in reports concerning, human error, medical complications, and negligence. The presence of heads of human rights bodies was also scheduled for the symposium, a factor described as “significant” by activists in patients' rights, who note that the body charged with looking at medical error complaints, the Shariah Medical Commission, is composed of three doctors and a judge.
