Abdullah Al-Jeaithan
I DO not understand why young Saudi men and women who want to study medicine, pharmacy or engineering are facing insurmountable obstacles and cannot be admitted to the relevant courses. Every year, we recruit doctors, pharmacists and engineers from abroad and many of them later turn out to have fake diplomas or low GPAs. In some cases, we recruit individuals who have graduated from universities where classes consist of hundreds of students.
In Saudi universities, the classes in medicine, pharmacy and engineering schools usually have only 25 students because the universities realize the importance of these specializations to our economic development.
Our focus should not only be to hire Saudis but to encourage Saudis to engage in research and studies in their relevant fields. Saudis would be more careful than their expatriate counterparts when carrying out research or a study about certain issues in society. A large number of expatriate doctors and pharmacists treat patients who come from their home countries better than the way they treat Saudi patients and even prescribe the best medications to expatriate patients.
Some expatriate doctors and pharmacists only care about money and might engage in illegal practices such as prescribing the medications of a certain pharmaceutical company to patients in large quantities in exchange for a commission from that company.
A young Saudi man, who was working as a medical representative for a pharmaceutical company, said that some pharmacists would blatantly ask him to give them a commission to promote his products. Doctors sometimes do the same and demand commissions from pharmaceutical companies to promote certain medications.
I hope the admission process into medicine, pharmacy and engineering courses gets easier and that more students are taken in. We have many Saudi students who are very serious about these fields and want to enroll in these courses.
