This nurse works at KAMC, Riyadh and lives at Al-Yamama Compound. She comes from the UK. She is working in Coronary Care and commenced in January 2011 and is recontracting for another year. This interview was done in November, 2011. Its a really good accurate description of nursing and living at this hospital.

I arrived alone to Saudi. The arrival went very well, there were absolutely no problems. I was really rather well informed about what was going to happen when I get to Saudi; somebody from the hospital will pick me up and accompany me to my place of residence - and so it was. We drove to the compound and my first impressions of my accommodation was as expected - I had seen photos of the accommodation before. So basically my arrival went just as I had expected. There was an information pack waiting for me at the compound, and it gave me all the information I needed to get settled in.

I live in a villa, which I share with two Irish girls. We each have our own room and we get along very well. My compound is not right by the hospital. We have a bus service that takes us to and fro from work. There's a timetable for the bus, which I got in the information pack. The bus ride to work takes about 40 minutes - it would be less but due to some construction at the moment, we have to take the longer route.

I went to the hospital the next day. There is initially an orientation for the new nurses. It seems like it's so long ago now, but I think it lasted roughly two weeks, maybe ten days. It consisted of the hospital environment itself, having a tour of the hospital, going to my ward, collecting uniforms, sorting out your bank account etc. All this is done during orientation, so you'll have your bank account and other essentials set up before you start the actual work. You get to know your orientation group rather well and you make friends there. You don't really get to see much of the ward you'll be working on during the orientation - the information is more generally about the hospital and its policies.

I work in the coronary care unit. My ward has 19 beds and usually there'll be 10 nurses working on a shift. If I compare the work here and back home in the UK, I think that nurses are much less autonomous here. To be honest, at least how it works on my ward, I feel I don't have as much autonomy as I did back home. Sometimes I feel like I'm being policed the whole time. It's ok - it's just how they run the system here really; they have audits all the time and your work is constantly checked. This is done for everybody, so you shouldn't feel singled out! 

We have a 2:1 patient-nurse ratio here. In the UK I would get three, sometimes four patients. But the way the ward is run here, keep you busy enough. You have to take care of things that in the UK you wouldn't have to bother with. Everything is controlled by the computer system. You have to put lots and lots information into the computer system. Everybody here has their own laptop. You either place it beside the bed or you leave it directly outside the room. So when you do a physical assessment you need to record it in the system, when you measure the blood pressure of the patient you have to put it in the system - so it's lots and lot of computer work.

Another thing about working here is that you are assured that there'll be an interpreter working with you. I find it rather terrible. I have no Arabic, so I won't understand if they ask for something as simple as a glass of water, so it's mostly non-verbal communication with the patients. You'll be looking for an interpreter, and one mightn't be available immediately and on occasion you won't find one at all. Although, this is something that differs from my expectations, I don't regret coming over here at all. It's difficult at first, but you learn to get by very quickly. I think on my ward there are a lot of Filipino nurses. Most of them have been here for many years and so they can help with the interpretation as well. Sometimes the patients get frustrated with the language barrier as well. Thankfully a lot of them understand the situation and are okay with it. The staff speaks English and the handover will always happen in English. I've had a wide range of patients here, but something very different is that you may encounter some very uneducated people, like the some of the poorer people living outside the big cities. So you might not only be hindered by the lack of a common language, but also they won't necessary have any understanding of the basic medical procedures that happen in a hospital. For example, you might be trying to do a blood draw and the patient flat out refuses and says that they don't want blood taken from them. So even if you explain to them that it's necessary for us to be able to know what care the patient needs, they might refuse. If I can't get through to them, I'll get somebody who speaks the language better to try to persuade them. I've picked up some odd words, but can't have a discussion in Arabic.

Sometimes I feel like you have to help the doctors a bit more than back home. Not the consultants doing the ward rounds but the on-call doctor. In England the doctor would automatically know what blood to order for a patient. Here in Saudi you almost have to tell them what needs to be done. So in a way I feel like I have more responsibility here than what I was used to before. In CCU back home, we had a phlebotomist team that would come around and take the morning blood (or when required), or then the doctor would do that. Here, the nurse has to do this - so if you haven't done it previously, you need to learn it here. The CCU nurses are expected to be able to insert cannulas as well. Again, the colleagues are very helpful, and the ones that have become accustomed to doing these procedures will help you.

I do 15 shifts a month and one shift is 12 hours long. You are expected to do an equal amount of day and night shifts. I actually prefer the night shifts because it's less busy. There's not that much happening around you, there's less people and I can just "breathe a bit better". During the day shifts everything is more hectic, and as I mentioned, you feel like you're under constant surveillance - they expect you to "have things done yesterday". In the first two hours of your shift you'd be expected to have done x, y and z. This is not always possible if your patient is unwell or if something is out of the ordinary. Rather than managing your own workload and getting there in the end, everything has to be done at once and in a hurry and somebody's monitoring you all the time. KAMC Riyadh is a very large hospital. It is busy in a different way from what I'm used to in London - the hurry at large is due to everything being expected to happen at once. I'm used to working in a much more relaxed environment and find that it is rather regimented here.

I find the drug management is rather similar to the UK. However back home I had to draw up my own IV medication, while here it's all pre-prepared for you by the hospital pharmacy, which I think is a good thing. We have a really good relationship with the pharmacy and if the needed medication is not currently available on the ward, I can ask the pharmacy if somebody can go and collect it. The only time the patient might have to wait for their medicine is when they're being discharged.

We have about 60 people working in our ward. About 40 are from the Philippines, 10 from Malaysia, 3-4 from Saudi, 2 from Australia, 2 from South Africa and me and another girl from the UK. My flat mates are Irish. So you have a multicultural working and living environment.

What's good about working here compared to back home is the weather of course. Also the pay is good. Although I think the salary is on par with UK salaries, you don't have to pay tax or for the basic bills you'd be paying at home - you don't need to pay rent, for gas, for electricity etc. You only really have to pay for food and for taxis. There's no public transport here so when you want to go to the store for example, you need to hire a taxi. We use the taxi service provided by the hospital. There's a pool of drivers and you get to know one or two of them. After a while you call their mobile directly to organise a ride. I'm quite happy to go out and shop by myself, but I would always recommend you to use the hospital taxi service rather than an outside taxi service, since that was what was recommended to me. A one-way taxi ride to go shopping is on average £8 (13 USD), and ideally you'll split this with two other girls. But I don't see any problem with going shopping by myself. There is also a bus service that takes you to different shopping malls from the compound at given times.

What I find really positive about my job here, is the very modern equipment. Everything's up to date and new. This is much better than it was back home. There's also little perks here and there - the hospital will do your work laundry for example. The hospital will also provide your work clothes, but you need to bring your own pair of white shoes (the shoes have to be white, but you might have trainers that have a different colour logo on the side for example). The main uniform is white, but as I work in the CCU, I wear scrubs.

The compound is lovely. We have a hairdressers, gift shop, and a convenience store, an inside and outside pool, a fully equipped gym, a sauna, a jacuzzi and a restaurant. One the compound you can dress as you want, but if you leave the compound, you'll have to put your abaya on. You need to take your head scarf with you. Wearing it is not compulsory, but going downtown shopping or something, you might get the religious police stop you and ask you to cover your hear. So what I generally do is I wrap the scarf around my neck and if I get asked to cover my hair, I do. It depends where you're shopping really. I'll be asked to cover my hair maybe 30 % of the times - not that often.

There's absolute fantastic shopping facilities here. You can get absolutely everything here. They seem to have every single store we have in the UK here as well, and more. I think the price range is about the same as back home. The only thing is that you can't try anything on - there are no changing rooms in the stores. This is probably due to most of the serving personnel being men. So you have to know your size. What you can do is purchase it and go to the toilet in the shopping centre and to try it on there, and bring it back if it doesn't fit. There's a 7-day return policy so you could do this at home as well.

The shops open at 9 am and close again at 12 noon. Then they open again at 4 pm and are open to around midnight. But in between there's some prayer times so the shops will be closed. There'll be a prayer call or a couple of prayer call and they last about 30 minutes. I think one starts 6.45 pm. Everything closes during prayer outside the compounds.

Over here I'm saving on not having to pay rent, gas, electricity etc. I've only been here for 9 months, and so far I haven't saved that much because I still have expenses in the UK that I pay for from here. I've also done a lot of travelling during my stay - I travel every two-three months. I've gone to Jordan, Dubai, Bahrain and I've been back in England twice. Without coming here, I would have never visited these countries. But from here going to the neighbouring countries is really easy -you just book your flight online. I'd advice anybody coming from the UK, or anywhere from Europe, to get a multiple visa when they arrive. It lasts six months and it means that you can come and go in and out of the country as much as you please for those six months. During your first three months (the probationary period), you can't travel abroad. After the first three months you receive your residency permit, which allows you to apply for a multiple exit-entry visa. This allows you to travel not only on your official leave but also during a weekend or whenever you have a couple of days off. This visa has to be first used within three months of them first issuing it - otherwise it's forfeited. It's valid six months starting from the first day of travel (the first stamp). It costs about £85(133 USD). And also, if you use a hospital ticket to travel, they'll contribute about £30 for the six-month visa and you pay the difference.

Apart from travelling and shopping, there are loads and loads of restaurants and cafés (also familiar ones like Starbucks and Costa Coffee). Western brands can be seen everywhere.

You make a lot of friends and you can have an active social life. The embassies often advertise different functions they organise.

I haven't really experienced any kind of culture shock. I was pretty well informed about the culture and lifestyle of Saudi before coming. To be honest, I haven't really been in that much contact with the locals or the local culture - when you leave the compound and hospital area, it's of course a part of your life in terms of considering your dressing for example. But otherwise I don't really feel that it affects me all that much. I really haven't got any problems with the country -I quite like it.

I keep in contact with my friends and family through Skype. It's very easy. My advice to others would be to bring a laptop, iPad or iPhone or something like that with them to use Skype. I wouldn't use my mobile to call home because it's more expensive - maybe about 50p (0.8 USD) a minute. Internet is quite easy to access from here - you can just buy a dongle. In our villa we have a wi-fi connection that the three of us share. We got it for a year and I think the over all cost was about £450 (705 USD), which we of course split into three. I think the dongle will cost about £15 (24 USD)/ month for unlimited access. The only place at the hospital that you can get the internet for private use is the cafeteria. My friends have bought both laptops and phones from here. I'm actually going to upgrade to an iPhone myself - they might be a little cheaper here, but not that much. Something that is much cheaper here is food. Besides calling home, I use my computer and internet for transferring money to my UK bank account. Each transaction costs about £8 (13 USD). So transferring money back home is easy and I haven't had any problems with it.

The best things for me here in Saudi are the fantastic travel opportunities. Also I appreciate the larger disposable income, and chance to save some money. I am definitely going to re-contract for another year.

Thinking back about the application process, I got a list of things that I had to do from Professional Connections. My advice to others would be to get some of those things ticked off every day - try to take one or two things to do one day. And before you know it, the whole thing will be done. The process took me about four months. So when Professional Connections gives you the list about what need to be done, be organised about it.

I don't think I was all that nervous about leaving off to Saudi - probably a little. After going through the application process your mind is set on going. And after you get here, it's just fine - it really is!

I can recommend KAMC. Meet my Manager in London and Manchester on Feb 2nd and 3rd, 2012. To arrange an appointment email nurses@profco.com