Health Minister Dr Jamal Al-Harbi

KUWAIT: Health Minister Dr Jamal Al-Harbi stressed that increasing health service fees for expatriates was necessary as part of a comprehensive health reform program. Harbi added that the nature of doctors' jobs and duties might make it difficult to impose the fingerprint system on them, because this might affect the healthcare procedures and requirements needed for patients. Harbi also stressed that it is hard to nationalize medical, nursing and technical jobs in the near future.

On another health concern, the Capital health zone director Dr Fatima Al-Asoumi said the new Amiri Hospital would be completed by mid-2018. She noted that the current Amiri Hospital's casualty department is being expanded to include 13 extra beds and develop its recovery rooms. "Expansion will be done in three phases, of which the first one is already completed and will be opened soon," she added, noting that work on the second phase will commence in three weeks and the third would commence after three months.

Fuel prices

Responding to local press reports published yesterday about Kuwait Petroleum Corporation's (KPC) request to restudy prices of all fuel types pending increasing them, KPC yesterday issued a statement explaining that its role was only to review prices and that a committee was responsible for monitoring international oil prices to use them as references in determining the prices of fuels in local markets. KPC also stressed that it reviews these products' international prices monthly, then reports the study results to the committee entrusted with restudying all government-provided subsidies at the finance ministry.

Gas consumption

Minister of Oil and Electricity and Water Essam Al-Marzouq said Kuwait consumed 229 billion cubic feet of gas during the summer months (April-September), an increase of 14 billion cubic feet compared to the same period last year. Marzouq stressed that the highest consumption rates were in July with 41.666 billion cubic feet consumed, compared to 37.2 billion cubic feet in the same period of the previous year. Marzouq explained that Kuwait's consumption of gas in the same period of 2015 was 208.5 billion cubic feet, which jumped to 214.6 billion cubic feet in 2016 and 229 billion in 2017. Notably, Kuwait has signed three contracts with British Petroleum, Shell and Qatar Gas to import 2.5 million tons of liquefied natural gas annually for four years (2016-2020).

By A Saleh