Professional Profile

Dr. Arwa Althumairi serves as Vice Dean for Development and Community Partnership at the College of Public Health, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University (IAU), a role she has held since 2018, overseeing strategic planning, accreditation, quality assurance, community partnerships, and faculty development. She is a Public Health Consultant accredited by the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties and a qualified external reviewer for the National Center for Academic Assessment and Accreditation (NCAAA). She has led the accreditation of multiple academic programs and brings expertise in quality evaluation, KPI development, curriculum mapping, and learning outcomes assessment. She is a 2025 Leadership Fellow of the IAU Center for Leadership and a recipient of the Taj Award (2025) for community engagement.

Academic Profile

Dr. Althumairi is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Health Services Research in the Department of Health Information Management and Technology at IAU. She earned her PhD and MSc from the University of Leeds, UK, and her BSc from IAU. She coordinates and teaches undergraduate courses in epidemiology, biostatistics, and research methodology, as well as the postgraduate course Research Methods in Quality and Patient Safety. She has supervised six MSc and two PhD theses to completion and currently supervises three PhD candidates.

Research Profile

Dr. Althumairi's research focuses on healthcare quality, patient safety, digital health, primary healthcare, and health services research, using epidemiological, mixed-methods, and evidence-synthesis approaches including systematic reviews and meta-analyses. She has published more than 22 peer-reviewed articles in international journals such as BMC Health Services Research, Frontiers in Public Health, and the Journal of Advanced Nursing, with 687 citations and an h-index of 13. Her recent work examines near-miss reporting, patient-centered care in Saudi primary healthcare, telemedicine adoption, and the national implementation of One Health in Saudi Arabia.

• Patient safety: near-miss and medical error reporting, incident reporting systems
• Healthcare quality and accreditation: CBAHI standards compliance, quality improvement
• Patient experience and patient-centered care, especially in primary healthcare
• Digital health: telemedicine, e-consultations, mobile health applications, virtual reality
• Health services research and health policy: transformation policies, provider satisfaction, One Health implementation
• Healthcare workforce wellbeing: burnout, anxiety, and psychosocial impact on health workers
• Epidemiology and evidence synthesis: cancer epidemiology, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses