158 | A Labor Market Assessment of Nurses and Physicians in Saudi Arabia
BOX 8.2
Key dimensions to consider in scaling up the role of private schools Accreditation and quality management. Any private sector institution would be required to meet standardized accreditation requirements if it is to operate, and monitoring should occur regularly to ensure that these requirements are enforced. Land. The government can offer private investors free or below–market rate land for sale or lease to set up schools. Or the government can give schools access to government-owned or government-contracted buildings to house schools. Student financing. Rather than finance schools directly, Saudi Arabia can finance schools indirectly by providing scholarships or loans to students at accredited private schools. Low -interest rate loans or matching funds. Saudi Arabia can provide matching grant funds or below–market rate loans to encourage the opening and expansion of private schools. Social impact bonds. To de-risk private sector investment as well as to ensure that the government only pays for results, the government can issue social impact bonds that pay investors an agreed-on amount upon the successful graduation of a certain number of health workers. Removing administrative burdens. To facilitate the opening of more private schools, Saudi Arabia could
remove some of the administrative barriers to the founding of schools. This can be accomplished through an analysis of the accreditation process to identify steps that do not add real value but instead burden the process of opening a school. Pedagogic public goods. Many schools have outdated curricula and it can cost upward of $500,000 to update a curriculum. Rather than have multiple schools in Saudi Arabia reinvent the wheel, Saudi Arabia can provide curricula and teaching materials (lecture notes, demonstration notes, PowerPoint slides, handouts, reading lists, and so on) for free. Public management goods. Health professional schools can be complex institutions, and one of the challenges of starting and expanding them is the management software (student tracking, classroom scheduling, clinical practica scheduling, and so on) and standard operating procedures necessary to efficiently run a school. Saudi Arabia can make such public goods available to all private health schools to reduce the cost and time required to start the schools and increase the likelihood of their success. In addition, Saudi Arabia can facilitate the establishment of networks of school administrators to share best practices—for example, networks of admissions officers, networks of deans, and so on.
Use bridge programs and continuing education
The existing diploma nurse workforce should be provided with work-friendly bridging training to transform these workers into bachelor nurses. The goal of bridging programs is to allow existing diploma nurses to upgrade their training and to enter clinical practice in as short a time as possible. The scenario projections in chapter 7 show that 35,866 diploma nurses would need to be trained to become bachelor nurses (if no other intervention to increase supply is implemented) so that the overall number of Saudi nurses would meet needbased demand in 2030. Standardized bridging programs are needed to allow diploma nurses to pursue part-time training alongside their current work responsibilities. Currently, no such opportunities exist for nurses in Saudi Arabia—to carry out bridging training or any postgraduate training—and a nurse has to exit the nursing profession completely to take up training opportunities, which makes it difficult to pursue such training. Offering part-time bridging programs in Saudi Arabia that can be undertaken alongside current work and, most important, that focus on clinical training elements (that is, that
