Health Minister Fahrettin Koca confirmed yesterday that the government will unveil three more city hospitals this year.

Mainly built in the suburbs, city hospitals aim to improve health standards by significantly increasing hospital bed capacity and addressing the shortage of doctors.

These large hospital complexes provide services in a diverse range of medical specialties not available in the other hospitals in many cities. To ensure the quality of services, the government has adopted a public-private partnership model for the construction and operation of the complexes. The city hospitals are being leased to private companies, and the government only pays fees for medical imaging, laboratories, security, maintenance and healthcare workers' salaries.

Three hospitals set to open this year are located in capital Ankara and in the northwestern city of Bursa.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency (AA), Koca said that the city hospitals across Turkey will have a total capacity of 44,409 beds and will make Turkey a global brand in health tourism. Construction of nine other city hospitals is underway across the country. The minister said that one of the primary goals of city hospitals were to treat patients "in only one hospital" instead of transferring patients to different clinics and hospitals for different phases of treatment and recovery.

Between 2017 and 2018, eight city hospitals were opened in the cities of Mersin, Yozgat, Isparta, Adana, Kayseri, Elazığ, Eskişehir and Manisa.

Among the hospitals set to be opened this year, Bilkent hospital in Ankara with a bed capacity of 3,704, will be the biggest in Europe. The hospital will have 904 clinic rooms, an intensive care unit with 674 beds and 131 surgery rooms, where more than 600 surgeries can be performed daily.

So far, more than 16 million patients were treated in eight city hospitals and that number would only increase. The government has also started a tender process to build 10 more city hospitals.