City hospitals are rising stars of Türkiye’s evolving health care system. Bringing together multiple hospitals under one roof, with the latest medical technology and hundreds of staff members, these massive complexes helped the country stave off the load on its health care system during the COVID-19 pandemic. Championed by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is credited with overhauling the crumbling health care system of the country, hospitals serve thousands daily across the country.
Currently, 19 hospitals are in service and Erdoğan, who termed the project his “dream,” recently said that a second city hospital would be opened in a few months in the capital Ankara. Fourteen city hospitals are also under construction. New hospitals will have a total bed capacity of 18,794, while those opened in the past couple of years have a total capacity of 25,298 beds. Two more city hospitals will also be opened in a few months in the northwestern province of Kocaeli and the western province of Izmir, while Erdoğan announced recently that a new city hospital was planned for the northern province of Ordu.
The hospital set to open in the Etlik district of Ankara will be the biggest in Türkiye with 3,724 beds and 938 clinics.
The hospitals provide quality health care services in an environment similar to state-of-art private medical facilities.
The mainly suburban project has set out to improve health standards by significantly increasing hospital bed capacity and addressing a shortage of doctors. To ensure the quality of service, the government has adopted a public-private partnership model for the construction and operation of the complexes. The city hospitals are leased to private companies, with the government only paying fees for medical imaging, laboratories, security, maintenance and health care workers' salaries.
Türkiye's health care system, which has undergone a major transformation since the early 2000s, is credited with an exemplary fight against the outbreak. Along with widespread access to imaging, city hospitals that serve as modern medical complexes boost Türkiye's health care capacity in a time of crisis. When the pandemic broke out, Türkiye had 1.1 million health care workers, 246,000 hospital beds and 40,000 intensive care beds. The country sped up the construction and opening of new hospitals amid the outbreak to address the burden of the disease on the health care sector.
