A study of newly hired foreign nurses in Saudi primary care used Evidano for its thematic analysis

Saudi Arabia relies heavily on international recruitment to staff its health system. Foreign nurses make up roughly 70 percent of the nursing workforce, coming mainly from India, the Philippines, and Malaysia, and total registered nursing staff passed 235,000 in 2023.

Research on foreign health workers in the Kingdom rarely focuses on primary care. This exploratory study asked three questions: what challenges newly hired foreign nurses face in a primary health care facility, how they cope, and how those challenges could be addressed. The article draws on Roy’s Adaptation Theory and Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory.

Participants were selected by purposive sampling from newly hired foreign nurses at one primary health center. Semi-structured, in-person interviews with open-ended questions were held in a private room at the facility and capped at 20 minutes so they fit around clinical schedules.

Recordings were transcribed with the DKBLabs transcription tool, and participants were given pseudonyms to protect confidentiality.

The researcher used Evidano to conduct the thematic analysis, describing it as a way to streamline a process that is time-consuming and error-prone when done by hand. The paper’s results table, which maps each theme to its definition, challenges, coping strategies, and participant examples, is presented as the output of the analysis in Evidano.

The researcher then interpreted each theme against nursing and social theory, including Social Support Theory, Communication Accommodation Theory, and Cultural Intelligence Theory.

Cultural adjustment and integration: nurses described adapting to workplace gender segregation, language barriers with Arabic-speaking patients and colleagues, and patient preferences for same-gender providers. They coped by learning basic Arabic phrases, using non-verbal communication and translation apps, and joining cultural exchange activities.

Professional challenges and support: new protocols, procedures, and documentation, together with language barriers, affected care. Facility orientation, mentors, colleague support, and continuing education helped nurses adjust.

Emotional well-being and homesickness: being far from family was a common strain. Video calls and messages home, friendships with colleagues, and social activities were the main ways nurses coped.

The paper recommends cultural sensitivity and diversity training during orientation, mentoring programs that pair foreign nurses with experienced local nurses, language support, and social events that build belonging.

This case shows Evidano supporting a focused, practitioner-led study in nursing administration. A single researcher turned short workplace interviews into a structured theme table covering challenges, coping strategies, and examples, then grounded each theme in established theory.

For health workforce managers, HR teams, and pre-departure orientation planners, it is an example of how quickly qualitative feedback from new hires can be turned into practical onboarding recommendations.

The study took place in one primary health care facility and the paper does not report the number of participants, so the findings describe that setting rather than all foreign nurses in Saudi Arabia.

Interviews were short by design, and the article does not describe a separate manual coding pass or compare the Evidano output with another analysis method.