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Introduction
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Shortly after establishing the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, one of the first initiatives of King Abdul Aziz Bin Abdul Rahman Al-Saud was to improve the health care facilities for citizens and the pilgrims who come to Saudi Arabia to visit the Islamic holy sites. Another milestone in this same tradition was the government's decision to furnish free medical treatment. To achieve this goal, each administrative region in the Kingdom set up its own medical facilities and within a relatively short time, once-endemic diseases such as malaria and smallpox were virtually eradicated, the infant mortality rate was drastically reduced and life expectancy rose sharply.
Beginning with the introduction of the first of the five-year Development Plans in 1970, the Saudi health care system underwent a dramatic quantitative and qualitative improvement. Even as the modern network of health care and social services was expanded across the entire country, technology was continually updated to incorporate the latest medical advances. Today, Saudi Arabians have access to a network of thousands of hospitals and clinics across the country and are no longer obligated to travel abroad to obtain specialized medical treatment. Sophisticated surgical procedures such as open heart surgery and organ transplants are routinely performed in various Saudi hospitals to the highest .
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