King Fahad Medical City is the largest hospital in Saudi Arabia

Dr. Mahmoud A. Al Yamany, CEO of King Fahad Medical City talks about King Fahad Medical City being the largest hospital in Saudi Arabia.

With four hospitals King Fahad Medical City emerged as the largest and most advanced medical complex in the Middle East with a total capacity of 1200 beds. Building costs were USD 633 million according to Wikipedia. Can you talk about your milestones and achievements in your short history?

King Fahad Medical City is the largest medical city and the largest tertiary care provider in Saudi Arabia. The medical city was established in 2004 and by 2015; we claimed the title of the largest in the market. The hospital has 1,200 beds today and the plan is to increase the capacity to 1,800 beds by the end of 2017.

The focus now is more on the major sub-specialities such as neuroscience, cardiac, cancer and diabetes. Although not on the day in day out treatment of diabetes but rather the research side, i.e. finding new modalities of treating diabetes and creating a diabetes database.

The strategy is to focus on the tertiary care. Today, the hospital boasts the largest neuroscience centre in the country, which is the National Neuroscience Institute with over 150 beds that is again set to expand to 350 beds by 2017. Similar developments are happening in oncology and cardiac treatment at the King Abdulaziz Heart Centre and the Comprehensive Cancer Centre.

These numbers have all been extrapolated from disease demographics and the country population demographics, looking at the overall disease burden on the population. This was designed to serve the middle zones of Riyadh and Qassim.

The city has been getting referrals from across the country; there are many medical cities being built and these medical cities will cater to similar mandates but will be servicing their own zones. Between now and when these medical cities are established, which will probably be a decade from now, King Fahad Medical City (KFMC) will continue to cater for tertiary care to the entire country and will expand on tertiary care.