Physician stabbing raises concerns about Saudi medical practitioners’ safety

The Health Affairs in Madinah issued a statement to condemn the incident saying that the attacker was arrested and an investigation is underway. (SPA)

JEDDAH: The stabbing of a physician at a Madinah hospital on Thursday raised questions of to what extent are doctors protected while on duty.
Dr. Rayan Arif was attacked by his patient’s relative who stabbed him with “a sharp object,” as the Ministry of Health stated, in his right arm at King Fahd General Hospital.
The Health Affairs in Madinah, under the Ministry of Health, issued a statement to condemn the incident saying that the attacker was arrested and an investigation is underway.
“Ministry of Health condemns the attack on the doctor and stresses that it is following the case until the attacker gets punished and that attacking health care medical practitioners is a red line,” read the statement that was posted on the ministry’s official Twitter account.
The incident caught public attention through social media and Madinah Gov. Prince Faisal bin Salman visited the patient. The prince was quoted in local media saying he refuses any attack against a worker serving the nation. Health Minister Tawfiq Al-Rabiah said he would stand by the injured physician and “no doctor will ever be hurt anymore,” local media reported.
Dr. Samira, who spoke on the condition that her real name not be published and who is a physician at a public hospital in Jeddah, told Arab News that she does “not feel safe at her workplace” after being verbally assaulted without being given the needed support by security staff at the hospital.
“Overall we don’t feel protected,” Dr. Samira, who prefers to remain anonymous, said, adding that even though there is a hotline at the hospital where she works to call when such incidents occur “they never respond.”
An angry patient verbally assaulted her, “cursing me and my family and saying very offensive words,” while she was at the emergency room where others heard him in an open area.
She had witnesses willing to help her in her complaint that she filed to a higher authority at the hospital. When she followed up on the complaint, she was asked to “forgive” the man who is in his 20s and because he was sick.
“I then told the hospital’s officials that if they didn’t take any action against the patient, I would call the police myself and report the case against the patient and against the security team and I have witnesses,” Dr. Samira said. That is when the hospital acted and suspended the patient’s file for three months.
But the patient then came back and continued to assault her colleagues. “In one occasion he was spotted yelling and knocking on the female doctors’ on-call rooms,” she said adding that a doctor then saw him and called security. “We don’t have a sense of security.”
Dr. Samira said she believes every hospital needs to have a legal adviser for such cases to protect doctors.
Radiographer Haneen Ahmed, who also spoke on the condition her real name not be used, sometimes works on evening and night shifts, which involves running CT (computerized tomography) scans for different patients.
“We sometimes see patients sent from ER with a history of trauma from a fight or after a road traffic accident under alcohol intoxication.” Ahmed, who works at a public hospital in Jeddah, added that patients are sent to the radiology department with occasionally a nurse and a relative, but not security guards. Only patients who are inmates are accompanied by police officers.
For cases when the patient is delusional, intoxicated due to alcohol consumption or is showing a violent behavior “a security guard should be present just in case he poses a threat to medical staff,” Ahmed said.
Last year, a man shot and wounded a doctor on duty at King Fahd Medical City in Riyadh before he fled, Arab News had reported.