Healthcare Staffing Market in Saudi Arabia
Industry Insights
The global healthcare staffing market has made significant growth in recent years, mainly due to the development of key healthcare-related infrastructure.
The market has been positively impacted on account of high demand for medical professionals due to the rising geriatric population coupled with a shortage of skilled professionals in the healthcare sector.
Region-wise, North America captured the majority share in the global healthcare staffing market in 2018.
In the coming years, the Asia-pacific region is expected to grow at a faster pace as compared to other regions owing to the increasing demand for contract staffing by the emerging countries.
Saudi Arabia’s population base is growing at a fast pace, coupled with a high rate of elderly population growth.
This has resulted in considerable demand for the healthcare system in the Kingdom to provide better healthcare facilities to the rapidly growing Saudi population, as well as the growing elderly population segment.
In 2018, the Ministry of Health employed 228,717 personnel across all facilities nationwide.
The region is still trailing behind in terms of skilled manpower, and as such, the government is forced to deploy doctors and nurses from other human-resource rich countries.
The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic across the world has left its footprints in the Kingdom as well. With more than 100K positive cases, the country is the worst-hit one among the GCC region.
This has forced the Kingdom to increase its dependence on ex-pat doctors, nurses, and other healthcare staff as the resources within the country is falling behind to meet the demand due to the growing pandemic.
The healthcare staffing market in KSA is broadly divided into two segments:
- The Healthcare Staffing Services
- Social Work Staffing services
Healthcare Staffing Services include hospitals, and medical practice, dental practice, and other health services
Social Work staffing services consist of social work with accommodation and social work without accommodation
KSA Healthcare Staffing Service by type, 2018
In recent years the Kingdom has witnessed an increasing number of patients with chronic diseases. Apart from this, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is another major driving force for the growing healthcare staffing market in the region.
Among the various trends in the healthcare staffing market, recruitment through social media is a prominent one in KSA.
Some other factors, such as the adoption of Nitaqat initiatives, are playing a significant role in pushing the Saudization targets in the Kingdom.
This initiative is creating a huge scope for the young and trained Saudi nationals in the healthcare sector.
Saudi Arabia represents the largest healthcare staffing market in the MEA region, and the sector is set to witness rapid growth in the near future due to the scarcity of trained resources coupled with the havoc created by the pandemic COVID-1.