Dr Bandar Al Knawy has been Chief Executive Officer of Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs (MNGHA) and President of King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Saudi Arabia since 2009.
MNGHA comprises five tertiary medical facilities and 40 primary healthcare clinics, employing 25,000 staff across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia providing care to over two million Saudi Arabian National Guard personnel, their dependents, and the eligible local population. Under his leadership, Bandar has led MNGHA’s transformation from a national provider of primary and secondary healthcare to a pioneering regional and global academic health system. MNGHA has undergone unprecedented and successful expansion to integrated national clinical, academic and research healthcare system.
King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences comprises eleven dedicated health science colleges distributed across three different campuses and serves over 10,000 students. With his management and direction, the Health Sciences University and King Abdullah International Medical Research Centre commissioned new state-of-the-art facilities, and he recently led a system-wide implementation of a highly advanced EHR system to integrate records across primary, secondary, and tertiary care in a single platform across all medical facilities in Saudi Arabia. It is MNGHA’s ambition to become truly a data-driven healthcare organization and world leader in this area.
Bandar is a strong advocate of patient safety and quality of care. He is also a clinical expert in hepatology, authoring and editing two books in the field. In efforts to disseminate expertise and experience in healthcare management, Bandar recently edited “Leading Reliable Healthcare”, a book that for the first time complied perspectives from global health system leaders to deliver a valuable addition to the healthcare management literature.