When injured expats have to run from pillar to post

RIYADH: Hospitals save lives in danger whether in normal conditions or in cases of emergency resulting from road accidents, fire or natural catastrophes. There are lots of well-equipped and excellent hospitals all across Saudi Arabia, but they are crippled by complicated procedures that may, sometimes, endanger lives of patients, notably expatriates. Due to growing rates of road accidents on the highways and inter-city roads, government-owned or private hospitals receive scores of accident victims daily, a fact that puts tremendous pressure on medical services. On the other hand, lots of foreigners in the Kingdom don’t have accident insurance and, therefore, are reluctantly admitted in public hospitals if the case is serious, but later they need to be transferred to other private hospitals because public hospitals only accept Saudi citizens or foreigners that work in the government sector. Foreigners who work in private sector companies need to go to private hospitals for medical treatment where their sufferings begin. Ahmed Rasheed, sales executive, told Arab News that the difficulties expats face dawned on him when one of his friends was involved in a car accident and transferred to a public hospital. Doctors and nurses were kind enough to handle the case, but after conducting an X-ray test, they discovered that his friend had a fracture at his back so he needed to be transferred to an orthopaedic facility where the doctor told him that the case was serious but, according to the rules, his friend being a private sector employee had to be transferred to a private hospital. And thereon began Ahmed’s bitter experience with hospitals. Ahmed left his friend in the emergency, took the report and then visited at least 7 hospitals. They all refused to accept the case saying, “Insurance doesn’t cover the accident and if you want to admit the case you have to pay around SR50,000 in advance in order to accept the case.” Ahmed added that his friend had to wait for more than 48 hours in emergency at the public hospital until they found a hospital that accepted the accident victim because it was considered as work injury and covered by insurance in that hospital, otherwise his friend would have remained untreated. When hospitals turn to be a purely profit-making entity, then we have a humanitarian problem, we need some regulations in order to save people’s lives otherwise lots of people will continue to suffer.   Arab News