KUWAIT: The Ministry of Higher Education announced that 710 students will get government-funded scholarships to study medical specialties, including medicine, dentistry and pharmacy, abroad. Minister of Education, Dr Hamad Al-Adwani, approved on Sunday the names of 3,454 students accepted in the foreign scholarship plan for the year 2023-2024 who graduated from public, private and foreign high schools in 2021/2022 and 2022/2023.

Lamyaa Al-Melhem, acting undersecretary of the higher education ministry, said in a statement that more students were accepted in specializations needed in Kuwait’s labor market compared to last year, she added. The number of students who will receive a scholarship for a medical specialty is 710 students, including 565 in human medicine. Public school students had a slightly larger share, nabbing 51 percent of the seats.

Their counterparts in private schools got 49 percent of the seats. There were also 745 students accepted in engineering specialties and 797 students in auxiliary medicine specialties. The plan put forward by the Ministry of Higher Education includes several specialties in several new countries, including immunology and pathology in Australia.

“Specialties that have been included in new countries such as aviation management and meteorology in Canada, dentistry, aeronautical engineering, occupational therapy, oral health in Australia, medical laboratory science in the United States of America, speech therapy in New Zealand, radiography in the United Kingdom and human medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons RCSI in the Kingdom of Bahrain,” she clarified. Seats allocated for medical specialties, such as dentistry and medicine, have jumped by 54 percent in this year’s plan.

The support for these specialties comes from the ministry’s keenness to provide the health system with high-quality and efficient expertise. Melhem called on students to abide by the immigration laws in the countries where they will be studying and adhere to the regulations of the scholarships set by the Ministry of Higher Education. She urged students and their parents to follow the ministry's account through official social media on Twitter and Instagram to stay updated on the procedures and requirements for enrollment. – Agencies