Ethics and Professionalism Courses for Healthcare Practitioners in Saudi Arabia

In Saudi Arabia, many ethical duties are also legal ones. The SCFHS Code of Ethics for Healthcare Practitioners sets out duties to patients, colleagues, the community and the profession, and the Law of Practicing Healthcare Professions turns several of them into rules with fines: self-promotion, commissions, confidentiality, consent and false reports among them.

Practitioners who trained elsewhere often find the general principles familiar and the detail different. Consent for young people aged 15 to 18 needs both the minor and the guardian. Publishing images of a procedure needs the patient's written consent and facility approval. Self-advertising is barred except as the Regulations allow. Generic ethics courses rarely cover these points; ours are written around them.

• Ethics and professionalism courses for doctors
• Ethics and professionalism courses for nurses and midwives
• Ethics and professionalism courses for dentists
• Ethics and professionalism courses for pharmacists
• Ethics and professionalism courses for health specialists and technicians

Each page explains the risks that matter most in that profession, the two core courses and the courses worth adding.

Ethics is about the decisions: consent, confidentiality, honesty, fairness, what to do when duties conflict. The ethics courses work through the SCFHS Code and the Law with scenarios from your profession.

Professionalism is about how you work day to day: reliability, respect for colleagues, working within your classification and licence, communication across a multinational team, conduct online and accountability when things go wrong.

Most complaints involve both. If you only have time for one, take the ethics course for your profession first, because it covers the duties most often named in a notice.

The Code of Ethics for Healthcare Practitioners is published by SCFHS. Its English edition sets out fifteen chapters:

1. Healthcare practitioner ethics (general principles)
2. Duties towards patients
3. Duties towards the community
4. Duties towards professional colleagues
5. Duties towards oneself
6. Duties towards the profession
7. Observance of religious rulings
8. Ethics of teaching and learning on patients
9. Documentation and authentication
10. Financial affairs in the healthcare field
11. Conducting biomedical research
12. Communicable diseases
13. Developments in healthcare practices
14. Emergency situations
15. Life-threatening and incurable diseases

The SCFHS Code of Ethics course walks through the chapters that come up most in practice and in complaints.

• Article 5: work in the interest of the individual and society, respecting life, safety and dignity.
• Article 7: keep up with scientific developments in your field.
• Article 8: give emergency care to a critically ill patient without asking for payment first, and arrange transfer if you cannot treat.
• Article 9: act in the patient's interest, with no unnecessary procedures and no work outside your specialty except in emergencies.
• Article 11: report suspected crime-related injuries and infectious diseases.
• Article 15: diagnose with due care; medical reports, sick leave and death certificates must follow the Regulations.
• Articles 18 and 19: explain the condition, risks and side effects, and obtain consent before intervening.
• Article 21: keep confidential what you learn in practice, except in the limited cases the Law allows.

Families often play a large part in decisions in Saudi healthcare, and practitioners can feel pulled between the patient and relatives. The rules are clear on the starting point: the Executive Regulations require the consent of an adult patient of sound mind, male or female, and the SCFHS Code lets you share information with family only where the patient agrees and it helps treatment.

The MOH Saudi Guidelines for Informed Consent add detail: adulthood is 18, consent forms are generally valid for no more than 30 days, and silence is never consent. They also take a different line from the Code on some reproductive procedures. For permanent sterilisation, the guidelines let a capable married patient consent herself and ask her to inform her spouse, without needing the spouse's approval. Check which rule your facility applies.

Three sets of rules overlap here. The Law protects what you learn in practice. The SCFHS Code bars publishing patient images in any media, new media included, without written permission, and images must not identify the patient. The Personal Data Protection Law treats health data as sensitive: it cannot be used for marketing, even with consent.

MOH has acted on all three. In November and December 2024 it referred practitioners over clips that showed patients, and in June 2026 it suspended a licence over social media claims about an off-label product.

Chapter 10 of the Code says making money must not be the main aim of practice. Fees must be fair, patients should be told estimated fees in advance, and commissions for referrals or prescriptions are prohibited. Article 12 of the Law bars rewards for steering patients and benefits from drug or device companies, with fines of up to SAR 50,000.

On gifts, the Code prohibits bribes and asks you to decline expensive gifts. Low-value educational items may be acceptable if they do not affect decisions, and meals offered to all participants at an event are acceptable. Personal cash, loans and travel subsidies from companies are not.

SCFHS registration lasts two years. At re-registration SCFHS checks CPD hours: 20 for technicians, 40 for specialists, 40 for pharmacists and 60 for doctors. We have not found an SCFHS rule that sets a share of these hours for ethics, so check the current requirements in Mumaris Plus.

Our courses do not carry SCFHS CPD hours. SCFHS decides how any learning counts towards your registration, and you can apply to SCFHS to have learning recognised through the Recognition of CPD Hours service.

Once your core pair is done, these are the courses closest to the duties most often raised in Saudi complaints.

1. What is my profession and SCFHS classification?
2. Which duties do I meet most in my daily work?
3. Where have I felt unsure in the last year?
4. Do I post about health online, handle controlled medicines or see many families?

The answers point to your core pair and one or two supporting courses.