Within the framework of the MOH's keen interest in improving and advancing the level of its health facilities, and in line with the Ministry's directives towards serving the patients and gaining their satisfaction, the Ministry managed to hire a constellation of local, distinctive consultant physicians as part of the Visiting Physician Program; in order to work at several central and reference hospitals; they amount to 600 advisory physicians. Whereas the total number of visiting physicians, since the beginning of the Program and till now, reached 1732 advisory physicians.
Meanwhile, the Ministry continued its successes in terms of recruiting a distinctive constellation of consultant physicians from Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan, holding the highest scientific qualifications on the most medical subspecialties, in order to work for several hospitals in the Kingdom's central and peripheral regions and cities. This is in light of the difficulty of permanently contracting with advisory physicians in some specialties due to their scarcity all over the world.
Furthermore, the Ministry started putting into effect the Advisory Visits Program, which aims at providing developed health services through having the advisory physicians pay repetitive visits to regions and governorates, namely the peripheral ones. This is with the goal of raising the level of the provided health services for patients in the places where they live, without the need to move to the other regions asking for treatment. It is worth mentioning that the Program is not only restricted to the MOH's physicians but also it includes all the calibers in terms of the Saudi physicians and those working at the governmental health sectors as a whole. Thus, the regions coordinate with those physicians according to the patients' needs of the different specialties, in order to make visits for 3-5 days every now and then; and according to the density of the patients' number to put an end to the waiting-lists problem. In addition, currently, a group of advisory physicians, from Jordan, Egypt, and Pakistan; numbering 118 ones, are visiting the Kingdom.
For his part, His Excellency the Undersecretary of Hospitals Affairs, Dr. Aqeel bin Gama'an Al-Ghamdi pointed out that the goal of recruiting those physicians is to alleviate the patients' suffering, treat the incurable cases, and reduce the patients' lateness appointments, in addition to benefitting from the global expertise with regard to developing the performance of the regions' hospitals. Also, it is to reduce the referral cases outside it, benefit to the extreme from those medical expertise, which were recruited to meet the health needs of the citizen and community, reinforce the patients' benefit from the existence of those medical expertise in the Ministry's hospitals, and contribute to developing the work flow at the sections of those hospitals through the workshops and educational lectures.
It is worthwhile to mention that, currently, communication with global, respectable centers and authorities is underway; in order to recruit the physicians and calibers in all the subspecialties which the Kingdom needs, represented by the Ministry of Health. This is through the Visiting Physician Program.
For example, the Ministry, currently, enabled to recruit a constellation of physicians and health practitioners to work in Hail Region, where 3 physicians, from the United States of America, are working now.
Moving on to the Northern Border Region, the Ministry enabled to recruit a group of distinctive consultants within the Kingdom and outside it, where corneal transplant procedures were conducted through a constellation of physicians, visiting the Province from King Khaled Eye Specialist Hospital. In addition, curative diagnostic cardiac catheterization and open-heart operations were recently conducted there.