The under secretary of the ministry of health in Saudi Arabia Dr. Abdulaziz Bin Saeed announced that the ministry of health is working on a new system for rating medical performance in the kingdom, it's expected that monitoring and evaluation of medical services will raise the level of quality in Saudi hospitals, that will definitely reflect on the Saudis health.
Dr. Abdulaziz said that the new rating system will include rewards and punishments, he added 'we admit our mistakes, but we seek to be better.
Insurance experts say that medical errors in the kingdom increased recently and have been a problem that plague the Saudis, the trust between the citizen and the medical system deteriorated badly, we need a strict rating system badly and hope that would reduce percentage of errors even on the long term.
yet it's difficult to give an accurate statistics about medical errors in the kingdom as most of the victims don't make a complaint. A large Saudi insurance company said in official statement that 5 Million Riyals were paid as compensations in the last year, this explains the real size of the problem.
In a survey made out by a Saudi magazine about medical errors, 70% of the volunteers blamed the patients who don't tell the physician his full complaint, many patients tend to hide being diabetic or hypertensive and that leads to misdiagnosis.
The authors of the new medical rating system put all the factors into consideration, the system is expected to lessen errors and induce quality in the medical institutions, the coming days will reveal so much.