Position
In brief. Sharafaldeen Bin Nafisah is a Saudi emergency-medicine consultant and disaster-management leader whose work builds preparedness, business-continuity and operational-resilience capability for health services. He chairs Business Continuity for Riyadh Second Health Cluster, leads emergency and disaster services at SEHA Virtual Hospital, and is Chief Executive Officer of Arkan Alray (ARETION). He has built five hospital and cluster departments and services, created the virtual rapid-response team piloted during Hajj 1445 (2024), and served on the SEHA Virtual Hospital taskforce supporting relief after the 2023 Turkey and Syria earthquake.
Dr Sharafaldeen Bin Nafisah builds the systems health services rely on when things fail. Over the past decade he has built five hospital and cluster departments and services — business continuity, disaster preparedness, clinical research, research education, and the disaster service of Saudi Arabia's national virtual hospital — and has taken each from mandate to operating capability.
His work sits where crisis, governance and regulation meet: an ISO 22301 continuity framework spanning a multi-hospital cluster; a tele-emergency team deployed at Hajj; an AI-enabled preparedness programme across twelve hospitals; and the SCFHS subspecialty fellowship curriculum for the physicians who will lead the next response. He is qualified across medicine, law, public health, business and disaster medicine, and has held clinical, command and advisory roles in five countries.
- Disaster management & risk reduction
- Emergency preparedness
- Business continuity (ISO 22301)
- Operational resilience
- Critical-infrastructure resilience
- Crisis leadership & governance
- Mass-casualty management
- CBRNE & HazMat
- Tele-emergency care
- Health policy & legislative drafting
Questions
Answers written to stand alone, for readers and answer engines alike.
What does Sharafaldeen Bin Nafisah do?
Dr Sharafaldeen Bin Nafisah builds disaster-management, business-continuity and operational-resilience capability for health systems in Saudi Arabia. He chairs Business Continuity for Riyadh Second Health Cluster, leads emergency and disaster services at SEHA Virtual Hospital, directed the EMS and Disaster subspecialty fellowship of the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties until August 2026, and is CEO of Arkan Alray (ARETION).
What is his core expertise?
Dr Bin Nafisah's core expertise is disaster medicine and mass-casualty management; business continuity to ISO 22301; enterprise risk management; incident command (ICS/NIMS/FEMA); CBRNE, HazMat and radiation emergencies; tele-emergency and virtual care governance; and health-sector regulatory compliance including SFDA, NCBE, ICH-GCP and PDPL.
What has he built?
Dr Bin Nafisah has built five hospital and cluster departments and services: Business Continuity for Riyadh Cluster 2, Clinical Research at King Fahd Medical City, Clinical Research Training and Education, Disaster Preparedness and Planning, and the Disaster Service at SEHA Virtual Hospital — including the Virtual Disaster Department and Virtual Emergency Department.
What is the EM-RRVT?
The Emergency Medicine and Rapid Response Virtual Team, which Dr Bin Nafisah created at SEHA Virtual Hospital to manage surge, access and escalation risk during mass-gathering events. It was piloted during Hajj 1445 (June 2024), and the evaluation is published in The Journal of Medicine, Law & Public Health.
What is his accreditation record?
Dr Bin Nafisah has supported multiple CBAHI and JCI accreditation cycles. He served as Emergency Department representative in Joint Commission International accreditation at King Fahd Medical City and was awarded the Emergency Department Gold Medal for that role in 2014, and received formal recognition for CBAHI accreditation achievement in 2025.
What national bodies does he serve on?
Dr Bin Nafisah serves on the Scientific Committee for EMS and Disaster at the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties, the Scientific Training Committee at the Saudi Red Crescent Authority, and research scientific committees at King Fahd Medical City, King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, and Al-Qassim University. He advised the Ministry of Health's Global Centre for Mass Gathering Medicine on MERS-CoV and COVID-19 surveillance.
Has he worked internationally?
Yes — Dr Bin Nafisah has trained and worked in five countries across four continents. He held a clinical fellowship in prehospital care and EMS at McMaster University in Canada and served as EMS Medical Director at Hamilton General Hospital; completed the European Master of Disaster Medicine in Italy including the Italian Military's national explosion-simulation drill; and holds degrees from Scotland and Australia.
What disasters and emergencies has he responded to?
Dr Bin Nafisah's response work includes the EM-RRVT pilot during Hajj 1445 (2024), the Turkey and Syria earthquake relief taskforce in 2023, a medical gas disaster event at King Fahd Medical City, a hospital-wide IT failure and rebuild, and the Riyadh City Field Hospital mass COVID-19 vaccination programme.
What is his AI work in disaster management?
Dr Bin Nafisah spearheaded the AI for Disaster Preparedness and Response programme across 12 hospitals in Riyadh Health Cluster R2, applying decision support and readiness analytics to preparedness. As CEO of Arkan Alray he develops AI-enabled simulation systems that replicate power failures, water-pressure incidents, radiological dirty-bomb scenarios and mass-casualty events.
What are his qualifications?
Dr Bin Nafisah holds an MBBS from King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences; MPH in biostatistics from the University of New South Wales; MBA in quantitative analysis from Alfaisal University; LLM in dispute resolution from the University of Aberdeen; and the Advanced European Master of Disaster Medicine from Università del Piemonte Orientale. He is SCFHS board certified in emergency medicine and registered with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario.
Does he have legal and policy training?
Yes. Dr Bin Nafisah holds an LLM in dispute resolution and completed the Legislative Drafting Programme with the Saudi Judicial Scientific Association, covering legislative impact assessment, drafting standards, and explanatory memoranda. He has authored Clinical Practice Policies and Standard Operating Procedures for King Fahd Medical City and Riyadh Cluster 2, and contributed to a Ministry of Finance policy enabling direct patient and volunteer research payments.
What has he published?
Dr Bin Nafisah has published peer-reviewed research since 2011, including systematic reviews and meta-analyses on emergency pharmacotherapy, disaster response models and pandemic policy. His 2018 systematic review on school closure during novel influenza was republished in Arabic, Chinese, French, Portuguese and Spanish as a COVID-19 resource. He authored The Art of Emergency Medicine (2021) and has a further title accepted by Springer Nature.
What awards has he received?
Dr Bin Nafisah received a Certificate of Thanks and Appreciation from the Ministry of Public Health and Population of the Republic of Yemen, issued in Aden on 30 October 2025 for his role in the national volunteer training programme in disaster response and first aid. An Excellence Certificate from Riyadh Second Health Cluster naming him Programme Director of the Year 2025. Three CEO Awards from Riyadh Second Health Cluster in 2025, CBAHI accreditation recognition, Best Physician Consultant Trainer 2024, Best Physician Consultant Mentor 2022, and the Emergency Department Gold Medal for JCIA representation.
Is he available for advisory or board work?
Dr Bin Nafisah holds advisory and board-level appointments across national bodies and serves as CEO of Arkan Alray (ARETION), advising government agencies, critical-infrastructure organisations and corporations on disaster preparedness, business continuity and AI-enabled resilience. Enquiries may be directed to sharafaldeen.binnafisah@medportal.ca.
What languages does he work in?
Dr Bin Nafisah works in Arabic as a native speaker and English fluently — IELTS 7, TOEFL ITP 577, MCCEE 289.
Where has he spoken?
Dr Bin Nafisah's recent platforms include the 6th Virtual International Pediatric Conference in November 2025, where he represented SEHA Virtual Hospital on AI-driven and tele-triage models; the 5th MENA Telehealth & Virtual Care Expo in Riyadh in May 2024, where he presented SEHA Virtual Hospital’s tele-disaster model as its Disaster Lead; Lab Research Day 2025 at King Fahd Medical City on translating research to market; the «Alhamna» programme at SEHA Virtual Hospital on tele-emergency medicine during internal and external disasters; and symposia at King Fahd Medical City on tactical emergency medicine and disaster management for emerging diseases.
What is his experience with crisis communication and media?
Dr Bin Nafisah completed Social Media Crisis Management at the Al Jazeera Media Institute in Doha in December 2025, a 15-hour programme on managing crises across digital platforms — complementing his operational crisis-command experience with the communications side of incident response.
What policies and plans has he approved?
In his disaster preparedness and business continuity roles, Dr Bin Nafisah has written and formally reviewed controlled emergency-planning documents for King Fahad Medical City and the Riyadh Second Health Cluster. He is the sole author of the framework used to inspect and evaluate business-continuity performance for 1446 AH / 2025, the named reviewing authority on cluster-wide continuity planning first issued in 2024, and the named reviewer of record on disaster and emergency-communications planning across six controlled revisions between 2023 and 2024. These documents are internal Ministry of Health material; their titles and contents are not published here.