The General Supervisor of King Saud Medical Complex (KSMC) Dr. Adnan bin Sulaiman Al-Abdul Karim addressed yesterday Sunday Feb 17, 2008, the inaugural session of the Informative Day of Rheumatic patients, which has been held under the slogan: You Are not Alone. "KSMC has established a unit for providing the best therapeutic and preventive services to rheumatic patients", he said.
Dr. Al-Abdul Karim confirmed the importance of upgrading the health status of both patients and families. "We must follow up the latest medical developments in the field in order to be able to provide better services", he said.
He said the community is really in need of activating the role of health education for providing medical guidance in a way as to enable patients to react more positively to health care providers. "Such educational programs must create real positive change in the lives of patients", he said.
On his part, the Head Department of Internal Medicine at KSMC Dr. Tariq Al-Khuwaitir said health education is an important step in curing rheumatism. He said the idea of the informative day has emerged from this fact.
"We are in need to take a number of steps if we are interested to effectuate the slogan of (You Are Not Alone)", he said. Such steps according to Dr. Al-Khuwaitir include availability of health education specialists at outpatient clinics, establishment of a body for the friends of rheumatic patients, allotting a phone line for answering inquiries on the disease, organizing informative lectures on the different rheumatic diseases, distributing informative booklets and pamphlets, and arranging for lectures aiming at improving the performance of physicians at primary health care centers.