Our stories
Putting Saudi Arabia on the road to better health
This project in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is aimed at giving people better-integrated healthcare, with an emphasis on prevention. Working in healthcare gives us the chance to deliver transformation that saves lives and demonstrates the positive, purposeful role we can play in society.
Setting the scene
Our network teams in the UK and the Middle East have been helping KSA healthcare providers design and implement a new Model of Care (MoC) - with a focus on prevention and integrated services.
With services available to the Kingdom’s population varying widely in accessibility and quality of healthcare provision, we were tasked to help create and implement a new strategy for how care is delivered to help address the disparities, and prevent them from increasing. As the Kingdom has a relatively young population, preventative healthcare can save lives and improve wellbeing.
Our experts from Strategy&, PwC’s global strategy house, alongside colleagues from across our network, aimed to embed the principles of quality care, at the right time and place, and help the Kingdom move closer to achieving its Vision 2030 strategy. This will reduce Saudi Arabia's dependence on oil, diversify its economy, and develop public service sectors such as health, education, infrastructure, recreation and tourism.
As a result, new services and access levels are being implemented in the Kingdom for the first time, having a huge impact on the number of people being able to access quality care.
How we helped
For instance, people will currently go to a Saudi hospital for headache tablets, diverting precious emergency care resources away from those most in need. By creating, and better communicating, a joined-up health service, people now have other routes to non-essential medication - establishing the right level of care at the right place.
For care to be integrated, organisations and care professionals need to bring together all of the different elements of care a person needs, which may be provided by several health and social care professionals. Done well, it reduces confusion, repetition, delay, duplication and gaps in delivering services and the chances of people getting lost in the system.
We established a business case and mapped the infrastructure needed to implement groundbreaking preventative care methods in the Kingdom. Clinical, operational improvement and change management became central components to the project and needed to be tailored to the client.
Engaging key stakeholders, developing implementation manuals and toolkits, and supporting effective communications helped the project succeed. We helped to upskill those working on the service locally to make it sustainable in the long run.
Collaboration between the UK and Middle East PwC teams meant knowledge could be shared on the latest innovations, best practices and research in healthcare transformation, built on a foundation of understanding of the local Saudi environment.
The project has earnt recognition at ministerial level in the Kingdom, as well as in the local media.
“The PwC team has provided us with excellent ongoing tailored support on our complex national healthcare transformation project. They have been responsive, flexible and worked to build capabilities to support the implementation of a transformation project that will span several years and impact positively on the lives of many.”
Making a difference
We widened access to efficient preventative healthcare services that are helping to improve the quality of life for many. Key milestones we’ve reached in the project include:
- The first-ever hospice care provision in the Kingdom.
- 17,000+ patients seen in two urgent care clinics with an average wait of six minutes.
- 14,000 patients reached as part of improved safe birth services. More than
- 1,300 mothers and babies were seen in one PHC as part of community-based antenatal and well-baby clinics over a period of months.
- The first postnatal visit by a midwife to a new mother in her own home, a groundbreaking step for postnatal care which was previously all hospital-based.
- 1,000+ students attended wellness sessions across 14 schools.
- Bringing in last-phase services such as hospice care, and more than 10,000 patients being seen in two urgent care clinics, with an average wait of just six minutes.
The strategy we developed with the client is now being delivered on the frontline, transforming health services for families and children across KSA.
We were working in three of five regions in Saudi and a big part of the project was to build capability. We've now left healthcare providers in these three regions to continue themselves and take our work forward. We are now extending our support to another two regions, where we're beginning to work with hospitals and clinicians to provide similar levels of support.