KARACHI: Jeddah-based Islamic Development Bank, of which Saudi Arabia is the largest funder, turned out to be a blessing for women doctors such as Farah Farooq, who dreamt of becoming the first female doctor in her conservative family and finally did so, before marriage threw a spanner in the works.

While Farooq’s struggle paid off and she graduated in medicine from the Dow University of Health Sciences (DUHS) in Karachi in 2000, her family married her off shortly after her final-year exams, dashing her hopes of serving people and causing significant distress to her.

Dr. Farooq was one of over 30,000 women doctors in Pakistan who graduated between 1989 and 2017 but either did not enter the medical profession due to societal pressures or left it after marriage, despite completing five years of rigorous studies and a one-year house job.

However, the IsDB came to her rescue. It provided a second chance for doctors such as Farooq to fulfill their dreams by extending financial support to the Pakistani educational technology platform EduCast and Dow University of Medical Sciences, enabling the re-entry of doctors who had left the profession— after the government had invested Rs10 million ($35,947) in each of them.

Dr. Farooq, who returned to the field in 2021, almost two decades after her graduation, says she had gone into depression after distancing herself from her profession due to a lack of family support and her responsibilities as a mother of three.

“I couldn’t pursue any of my dreams, for which I had worked so hard for 5 years, almost 6 years with the house job. It did bother me a lot,” she said, adding that the e-doctor program by EDUCAST reopened that “bright window.”
“It bridged that gap of 20 years. It brought me back into it and it created that ambition again,” said a smiling Farooq, who now sees patients from her home clinic.

Societal norms, under which many Pakistani families often marry off their daughters at a young age or do not allow them to work even after completing professional education, have driven tens of thousands of woman doctors away from practice, according to Professor Dr. Jahan Ara Hasan, the DUHS pro-vice-chancellor and a key member of the e-doctor program.

“They are simply wasting the resources of the country,” she said, highlighting that nearly 70 percent of all medical students in Pakistan were women.

Over the past six years, she said, the e-doctor program had trained around 1,500 woman doctors and brought them back into the profession.

“Through this digital learning program, we train them on the principles and certain aspects of family medicine,” she said. “And we made a lot of them to come back into clinical practice and into telemedicine too.”

Potential trainees in Saudi Arabia

Abdullah Butt, the EDUCAST chairman, explained that many “missing” woman doctors were married abroad to Pakistani husbands, including 1,500 in Saudi Arabia who have been identified as potential EDUCAST trainees.

“We have trained 75 of them till date and now we are targeting more,” Butt told Arab News, mentioning their plans to develop a training program for Pakistani woman doctors in Saudi Arabia that is aligned with the Kingdom’s health care system as well as to teach them the Arabic language.

“This we have been discussing with Islamic Development Bank and King Salman Relief to prepare special incentive for these Pakistani doctors to learn Arabic language, to get trained into Arabic language.”

Dr. Nibah Badshah, a 2011 graduate of the DUHS, moved to Saudi Arabia a year after completing her MBBS degree, but could not practice medicine due to family responsibilities.

“It wasn’t expected of me, but I felt it necessary to take that decision myself,” she said, crediting a friend’s introduction to the e-doctor program for her return to the medical field.

“It really was that stepping stone for me to come back into the medical field that took a lot of time, effort and dedication to earn that medical degree.”

Dr. Badshah, who completed her online master’s degree in public health from the King’s College in London in August this year, says this is an “exciting time” to be in Riyadh, with all the transformation happening under Vision 2030 that aims to cut the Kingdom’s reliance on oil and develop public service sectors such as health, education, infrastructure, recreation and tourism.

“I hope I can align my efforts to one of these goals to bring about sustainable change that is focused on improving quality of life,” she added.