As Saudi Arabia reimagines healthcare as part of Vision 2030, the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties’ graduation ceremony celebrates the young people powering the future of care.
Under the Health Sector Transformation Program (HSTP), Saudi Arabia’s healthcare industry is undergoing the most ambitious transformation in its history.
It’s comprehensively reimagining the way care is conceived and delivered, investing in modern facilities and e-health to strengthen prevention and emergency readiness. Through these reforms, Saudi aims to deliver on its Vision 2030 promise, which includes targets to have high-quality care across all regions, and an 85% beneficiary satisfaction rate across all healthcare settings.
But restructuring can only take you so far, as a healthcare system is only as effective as the people that run it; the clinicians and technicians, the specialists and trainees, the thousands of practitioners who provide care at the bedside. This is where the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties (SCFHS) plays a key role. As the national regulator for health professions, SCFHS is responsible for expanding training capacity to create a workforce ready to serve communities across Saudi.
In December 2025, years of work came to fruition as Saudi’s national sports monument, Alawwal Park, filled with graduates from around the globe for the largest-ever SCFHS graduation. For the 12,500 new healthcare professionals, and the 14,000 guests – made up of friends, family, and countless teachers and mentors – this was a moment to reflect and celebrate.
A stadium brimming with pride
“We are here to celebrate 12,500 graduates who have spent years of hard work learning, studying, and training,” says Fahad Alrowaitea, Executive Director of Corporate Communications at SCFHS. “We want to make sure we match their energy and show that Saudi is investing in its people, training systems, and education.”
Since its inaugural class donned their caps in the mid-1990s, the SCFHS graduation ceremony has evolved into an annual celebration for the Saudi healthcare community. What started as just four specialties in 1994 has grown into a world-class education program spanning 198 specialties across 109 training centers in Saudi Arabia and worldwide.
Today, Saudi Board programs are accredited postgraduate specialty training programs that prepare qualified clinicians from medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, and selected medical science professions for advanced clinical practice and professional certification.
This year’s graduating class speaks to the breadth of that ecosystem, with around 5,800 graduates from Saudi Board programs, and the remainder emerging through the Health Academy’s job-linked pathways, together representing 22 countries and more than 170 specialties. As Alrowaitea notes, the ceremony is not only a milestone for each trainee, but “a message about the scale of impact and the weight of our mandate.”
For the 2025 ceremony, the stadium began to fill hours before, in anticipation for rousing speeches from the Minister of Health, Fahad AlJalajel, and the Secretary-General, Prof. Aws Alshamsan. The program built toward the graduates’ procession and a collective oath-taking, an emotional moment that, as Alrowaitea notes, “felt like a seal to their commitment for their work.” The night then brought an electric display of celebrations, with a drone show and immersive theatrical performance which Alrowaitea says helped “make this an unforgettable moment to inspire graduates for the future.” Fireworks closed out the evening, which lit up the sky as brightly as the smiles on the faces of graduates, each filled with pride for what they have achieved.
Saudi Commission for Health Specialties’ Graduation Ceremony
Stepping up to the plate
Many SCFHS graduates came directly through The Health Academy, which offers programs for a wide range of roles, including disaster management and paramedic technicians to dental assistants, cardiac technicians, opticians, patient care technicians, and specialists in medical disinfection. For Alrowaitea, focusing on their future careers is as important as reflecting on the past.
SCFHS’s wider role is to build trust in the training system and to provide the frameworks that create a high-performing health workforce. Its mandate spans a broad range of regulatory and developmental functions, including setting professional standards, developing competency-based curricula, and administering health professions licensure examinations. It also accredits training centers and maintains the registration and classification of all healthcare practitioners in Saudi Arabia.
Committed to supporting healthcare practitioners and the overall healthcare ecosystem, SCFHS operates a suite of established digital platforms, such as Mumaris+, Anat, and Da’em. These innovations have transformed practitioner services, patient interactions, and regulatory processes, and advanced Vision 2030’s ambitions for e-health, integrated records, and digital medical solutions. Building on these foundations, SCFHS has launched a new strategic agenda for 2025-2030, delivered through 34 long-term initiatives. The new strategy reflects the changing nature of the global health workforce, strengthening training quality and outcomes, and enabling lifelong learning aligned with the needs of a rapidly advancing healthcare sector.
For each graduate who crossed the stage at Alawwal Park, the ceremony marked both an ending and a beginning. It represented the completion of extensive specialized training, and the start of a career that will change, and save, lives. But for Alrowaitea, watching on as thousands of new practitioners took an oath to their profession, one thing struck him above all: these people are the future of healthcare.
Find out more about the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties’ work to transform healthcare here.
