“Recruitment will be a critical focus for us over the next 18 months. The pace and scale of expansion of our services will depend on our ability to recruit suitably qualified staff from Qatar, the GCC and indeed globally as certain very specialised staff are in short supply worldwide,” said Peter Morris, CEO of Sidra.
“Sidra has 1,200 staff at present working in the outpatient clinics and at other services. This will go up to over 1,500 by the end of the current year. However, we will need 5,000 staff to run the hospital when it becomes fully operational,” he continued.
“This represents a huge increase in our workforce, so we are already ramping up our capacity and capability to handle this level of new recruitment. While we do this, we will complete the infrastructure within the new hospital, for example the remaining construction work and the commissioning and testing of our equipment and facilities,” noted the official.
The CEO pointed out that the focus from 2017 will be on the opening of the main hospital. He explained: “With the opening of the Outpatient Clinic, the development of day surgery, followed by more clinics and services, we will prepare for the opening of in-patient services for women and children in the main hospital building. Of course we have already opened services such as radiology and pathology to support the Outpatient Clinic in advance of the opening of the main hospital building.”
According to Morris, Sidra Outpatient clinic will be fully operational by January next year.
“We began the journey of opening services when we launched the new clinics and services at our outpatient clinic on May 1. We are launching more clinics and expanding our services every month. We expect our outpatient clinic to be fully operational by the end of January 2017.”
The CEO also emphasised that Sidra will focus on recruiting more Qatari nationals.
“While we are recruiting internationally in a number of areas, we are committed to bringing more and more Qatari nationals into the system. To that end, we are proud to sponsor many Qatari doctors, nurses and allied health professionals who are graduating from Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar and University of Calgary, Qatar. We also sponsor Qatari students in health-based corporate and support service roles,” he added.
Sidra hospital started its operations by opening a number of outpatient clinics from May this year and is adding more clinics and facilities month on month. The referral-based outpatient clinic provides highly sophisticated facilities and services for women and children.
Sidra Medical and Research Center is an ultramodern, all-digital academic medical centre which will set new standards in patient care for women and children in Qatar, the Gulf region and internationally.
Sidra represents the vision of HH Sheikha Moza bint Nasser who serves as its Chairperson. The high-tech facility will not only provide world-class patient care but will also help build Qatar’s scientific expertise and resources.