H.E. The Health Minister Dr. Tawfiq Al Rabiah has adopted the executive regulations of the Private Health Institutions Law after making substantial amendments, and adding new health services and activities.
According to MoH, the regulations have made a balance between motivating and empowering the private sector, to help enhance the quality of health services, as well as the monitoring and compliance tool observed by regulatory authorities. This will positively promote the private health sector’s attractiveness across the Kingdom. The regulations also have taken into consideration the international standards, in addition to flexibility and scalability for future ongoing updates. As well, the new regulations assign some MoH’s duties to other government bodies and private companies, to foster the principle of partnership, to open to door for the private and non-profit sectors, as well as giving equal opportunity to all stakeholders.
Also, to provide optimal health services to patients, the regulations include a mechanism to classify private health facilities, as a preparation for publishing its findings to the pubic; to enhance competitiveness in the private sector. It is noted that the newly added activities to the regulations - falling under support medical services - include: Emergency care centers, ambulatory transport centers, addiction treatment and rehabilitation centers, mobile medical clinics, independent home care and telemedicine. By Allah’s Leave, this is expected to promote the creative medical services, beside boosting the small and medium facilities’ contribution to the health system.
The new regulations are adopted in parallel with MoH’s launch of creative programs for e-license and self-assessment system for health facilities, which will have a qualitative shift in expediting services, as well as the quality of health services.
It is worth noting that the Health Minister has urged all MoH’s specialists to further enact laws and regulations that serve both the health sector and citizens. He also exhorted them to review the executive regulations periodically to include the latest updates and developments; in order to raise the Kingdom’s health sector up to the global states.