Qatar Stamps and Health Care in Qatar

Unfortunately, due to recent personal experience, I can vouch for the superb quality of health care in Qatar.

But this, as with most of the successes of today in Qatar, is fruit of many years of hard work and planning. Be it as a leader in gas exploration and export, aviation, sports and so on. Most of this hard work in these fields is well documented in Qatar's stamp issues.

As such, below I document the development of Qatar's Hamad Medical Corporation and the resulting World First Class Medical facilities. It all began in the hands of H. H. Sheikh Abdullah Bin Jassim Al Thani in 1944 with the construction of a twenty bed hospital, mostly with his own money for the main benefit of the Petroleum Company, but opened to the public in general.

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As Qatar gained its independence from Britain, the first duties of Qatar's first Amir, H. H. Sheikh Ahmad Bin Ali Al Thani, were to gain access to a wealth of Intergovernmental Agencies such as ICAO, UN, UPU and so on, most of which are documented in the stamps issued in his period.

The United Nations itself is made up  of a large number of organisations, of which the World Health Organization (WHO) is the one we are concerned with in this post. with the first issue related to this organization in Qatar being that of 1968 as can be seen in the image below. 

Clearly the development of the Rumailah Hospital (as seen in this set) and which became part of the Hamad Hospital was a big concern of the second Amir of Qatar, H. H. Sheikh Khalifa Bin Hamad Al Thani, with it been featured in 5 different stamp issues during his reign.

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Today the Hamad Corporation, established by Amiri decree in 1979, manages 12 hospitals (including 9 specialist) and is the first corporation of its kind to have all its hospitals accredited by Joint Commission International under the Academic Medical Center accreditation program, as is still growing.