UK Nurse at King Faisal Specialist Hospital Riyadh, Travelled  Sept. 2011

Is it very different to what you expected?

Coming here was probably the best thing I've done in my whole life! It's been absolutely amazing. The work also - I just love my new job!

Although I did quite a bit of research on Riyadh before I came here, I don't think I had a very clear picture of what it would be like. Although I got a lot of information from Profco, it's not something that you can really comprehend before you actually get here. I've been positively surprised by the social connections that you can make here, and how easy it's to get an active social life. Initially I was wondering how different it would be over here due to the very different cultural and religious setting compared to the one I've been used to back in the UK. However, it is less strict than I thought, and I came to notice that you're able to have a really good social life here.

As soon as I touched down in Riyadh, there were quite a few other girls that arrived on the same plane with me (Canadian, Finnish, UK etc.). There was a big group of us, probably around 20. Straight away I made friends with those people, and I believe we'll stick together throughout our stay. The hospital had arranged for someone to meet us at the airport and to take us to our compound. They were very, very friendly and provided us with a lot of information straight away. The next day we went to the hospital for our first GNO (General Nursing Orientation) day. The orientation lasted three weeks and provided a lot of information throughout. After these first three weeks I started at my ward.

It is very easy to get about. What you do is you use this taxi service (Hala Limousines) provided by the hospital. Actually, you end up using one or two taxi drivers and they're really, really reliable and friendly. It's very easy and quite cheap to use the taxi service. There are taxis going in and out of the compound all the time. It is rather like having your own chauffeur on call. The drivers are well known to the compound security guards, who always check who enters the compound - they'll even take a quick glance at the passengers' seat to make sure it's one of us girls and not a stranger.

I have walked to the "Hyper Panda" shopping centre once or twice by myself during the daytime. It is just down the road from where I'm staying and I felt quite safe. I don't generally go out and about by myself. Normally I would go with a friend or take a taxi because it feels safer. But if I felt like going for a beauty treatment or if I had a hair appointment and all my friends were at work, I'd go by myself as long as it's in the middle of the day.

The shopping malls are amazing; there's so many here. For example there's the Al-Faisaliah Center and the extremely tall skyscraper, the Kingdom tower, where you can go up to the top and take photos of the amazing view. You'll find all the big shops and brand names; all the ones you'd get in England, like Next, Accessorize, Monsoon to name some common ones. I don't actually know if there's any back home that they don't have here. Fashion is the same here, and you can find both everyday clothes as well as really dressy clothes (which you can wear to some of the parties, or balls, organised here). You can also find all the electronics you need, like laptops and mobile phones. I brought mine from home, but I have friends that have gotten both mobiles and computers here (so you're able to get the non-Arabic keyboards and mobiles as well). I did, however, buy a new SIM card for my phone here. Within the first couple of days after arriving, I went to a hypermarket down the road from where we're staying. There's a mobile shop "Mobily" in the hypermarket and I just walked in there and got a SIM card with 50 riyals (SR) on it. They very kindly put the SIM in my phone and it was up and running at once - so it was very, very easy. You have to bring a mobile that allows you to change the SIM card, or you can get phone here. You can get really cheap pay-as-you-go contracts. I called my mother back in England for about 30 minutes and it was only about 20 SR (~3,90 EUR / USD 5,30). Texting is cheap as well.

About the hospital:

It's a massive hospital and there's a lot of people. Everybody's really friendly and obviously all the staff speaks English. They call you "sister" which is nice really (and simple).

Nursing here is very different from back home. For example in the UK we had a drug trolley for giving out drugs which, I now realise, is a rather old-fashioned way of drug administration. Over here they've got what we call the Pyxis system, which may be in place already in places like America (certainly not in the UK yet). It's this big computerised system which tells you what drugs are due to which patient and the dose and everything. Apparently it's a much safer way of administering drugs.

Everything is done on the computer here. We use a computer system called ICIS. Basically you take a laptop with you most of the time, even just to administer drugs for the patients. You're actually at the patient's bedside administering drugs with the laptop - checking that you've got the correct patient and medicine and so on. Straightaway, you enter the information about the care you have just provided to the patient on the laptop. In England, you do the same on the chart at the end of the patient's bed. It took me some time first to get used to everything being computerised, but all of a sudden it all clicked right into place and I've gotten my head around it now.

There's maybe more hand-on care as you'll be allocated three patients, and you'll be in charge of delivering all care and drug administration to those patients. In England, you might have had health care assistants that could be delivering the care while you were doing your other nursing duties. But then again, you easily had 14 patients to look after, while here you have only three patients that you deliver all care to.

We use the TA/TB (team A/team B) system in my ward and I'm in my ward's team B. But I have some friends on other wards where they aren't doing the team system. They seem to be on different shifts.

If you're working weekends, you're working Wed, Thu, Fri and your off Sat, Sun, and then you work Mon, Tue and then you're off the opposite. With us, it's a two-week rotation. However, it's not a fixed standard throughout the hospital, and although most wards are rotating like this, some wards work differently. We do six weeks of day shifts and six weeks of night shifts, but I won't be doing nights until I've completed my three-month-probation period. So once that's completed, I'll do 50% days and 50 % nights. This seems to be the standard.

To work at my hospital contact nurses@profco.com