Lack of planning

Dear Sir,

We get caught up in talks of grandiose plans in Qatar that we often forget to implement small things first. We forget that these small things are essential for the big plans’ success.

Here, I would like to refer to a particular problem resulting from poor planning and possible lack of co-ordination among various government departments. A short while ago, when a person entered Qatar on a work visa, immigration authorities at the airport used to stamp the passport with “90 days to complete the process of the residency”. Now for reasons unknown, this grace period has been shrunk to 30 days. This causes huge problems for companies. One gets the feeling that the reduction of the period from 90 to 30 days has been done without proper consideration.

For instance, today, July 21, if you were to go online to schedule an appointment at the Medical Commission (for the tests that are mandatory for newcomers), the earliest appointment you get will be on August 26. Only after the medical tests, you can complete the rest of the formalities for residency.

Because of the long wait for an appointment at the Medical Commission, the 30-day deadline can’t be met normally and the company that has brought the workers will have to pay late penalties.

By the way, we often find ourselves having to schedule appointments at the Medical Commission after 8pm for its website to be responsive as it is “overloaded” during the day. To add insult to injury, last Thursday (July 18) we lost 27 appointments: we got an SMS informing us that the appointments made by my company for its new workers had been rescheduled. Until now we still don’t know to what date!

I have at least on two occasions read in Gulf Times that the Supreme Council of Health has been considering the assignment of medical tests of newcomers to private hospitals. Why hasn’t that been done yet?

If you follow the success of advanced countries, you’ll notice they the key plan is the “privatising” of such services where you will have proper monitoring and accountability unlike in the government sector and particularly in this part of the world.

And what’s further tying up our hands in our company is that our projects require security passes for workers to gain access to the sites. These security passes can’t be issued unless their Qatar ID is obtained. This means we have a lot of workers sitting idle in the camp for no fault of ours!

 

A frustrated manager, (Name and e-mail address supplied)

 

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