KKESH the "Tertiary" Eye Hospital

One of the pillars of KKESH is all about tertiary care treatment to all patients, which simply means that most if not all of our patients required a certain level of specialized eye care. And when I emphasized the word, "specialized", in lay mans basic understanding of English, it refers to a delicate and significantly advanced level of care. One of the pioneers would say, that during their times way back on the decade of the 80's and the 90's, only patients with referal and patients with challenging diagnosis are accepted. But as years goes by and the trend of specialized care evolved, the nature of specialized tertiary eye care printed on the basic mission of KKESH drastically loose its meaning.


As of today, we are dealing with patients with questionable health stability. As people may know, this institution was built for the sole purpose of dealing with any/if not all ophthalmic related conditions all over the kingdom. People may think that this huge center caters all kinds of eye conditions, yes it is true- but the question of medical stability is always the concern of most staff ophthalmic provider. How would you know if the patient has been treated or admitted in other medical facilities if they will not provide us with the right information.

Imagine a case of a premature baby from a far region of Saudi Arabia. It so happened that this patients' family had a "Royal Connection". Based on the fax message and brief medical bulliten of the patient, it was clearly stated that the patient is premature with low birth weight below the target acceptable birth requirement stipulated in the policy and procedure of the hospital. What happens next are part of "KKESH unstable judgement and policy". The upper executives decides to accept the case in spite of the fact that our hospital is well equiped "ONLY" with all the advance ophthalmic cases and not with a specific pediatric condition.

Finding out too late but once the bosses had their own way to twist on the policy they once sit on and follow for several years. The ending of the story is more interesting when the patient arrived in the hospital and based on eveluation by our ophthalmologists it says that there is no significant ophthalmic management to over rule the present health condition of the patient. To make the long story short, the patient was transfered to an able medically advance facility.