Within ninety days of its inception, the number of patients visiting clinics decreased by twenty-one percent, according to Dr. Abdullah Al-Sanad, the official spokesman for the Ministry of Health and Director of the Health Media Center. He made this statement while discussing the findings of a research on the adoption of the electronic sick leave application system and its effects on the caliber and quantity of care offered by primary health care facilities, which was carried out by the Ministry of Health’s Information Systems Department.

The incidence of visits to primary health care centers dropped by 21%, according to an analysis of data from a sample comprising approximately 23 million visits to these facilities and 630,000 sick leave requests from adults over the age of 18. This is in response to a comparison of 4,025,157 visits in the last quarter of 2022 and 3,182,195 visits in the same quarter of 2023.

Dr. Al-Sanad said that the study’s findings also revealed a 16% drop in the overall number of sick days. In the final quarter of 2022, 537,782 sick days were awarded on average per month; in the same quarter of 2023, this number dropped to 450,151 sick days. More than 56,000 working hours were also given to administrative and medical staff. In a related development, Dr. Al-Sanad confirmed that since Sunday, around 10,000 Afya insurance cards have been distributed through 18 locations across all governorates in the nation, with figures showing that 25% of the new segments or categories have been added.