Saudi Arabia Spends Over $500 Million Outsourcing Kidney Dialysis

Saudi Arabia Spends Over $500 Million Outsourcing Kidney Dialysis

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By AHMED AL OMRAN

Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Health awarded a $261 million contract to U.S. company DaVita Healthcare Partners Inc.DVA +0.18% to provide dialysis care for half of the country’s kidney dialysis patients.

“We will establish 80 clinics over the next 5 years to provide care for 5,000 dialysis patients,” the company’s chief operating officer Dennis L. Kogod told The Wall Street Journal over the phone from Riyadh. The Denver, Colorado-based company will also provide training for local technical and nursing staff in order to meet a 30% required quota for Saudi nationals of these centers’ workforce, he said.

This is the second contract of its kind to be announced by the Ministry. Last month they signed a similar contract with German company Diaverum to provide renal care for 5,000 more patients in the kingdom. The two contracts are worth a total of $522 million.

Saudi Health Minister Dr. Abdullah Al Rabeeah said in a press conference on Sunday that the decision to outsource dialysis care to foreign companies is due to the increasing number of renal failure patients in the country that the current care centers are no longer enough to handle the demand.

In a statement published on the Ministry’s website, Dr. Al Rabeeah said the foreign companies “will improve the performance of therapeutic services, provide specialized medical staff and delivery of drugs, supplies and consumables, hardware and their maintenance for all dialysis centers, as well as the transfer of the experience of these companies to the Kingdom.”

According to a pilot study published in the Saudi Journal of Kidney Diseases and Transplantation in late 2010, prevalence of chronic kidney disease in the young Saudi population is around 5.7%.

When Saudi Arabia announced its 2014 budget last December the government said it has allocated $28 billion for health and social services, accounting for 12.9% of total spending and marking an 8% rise over the previous fiscal year.

http://blogs.wsj.com/middleeast/2014/02/16/saudi-arabia-spends-over-500-million-outsourcing-kidney-dialysis/