By Justin Mays:
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's initiative to build more hospitals to revitalize the health care system through city hospitals is underway. The project named 'dream' by the President has 19 hospitals that are in service across the country so far.
There are fourteen city hospitals under construction, and the 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. The hospital set to open in the Etlik district of Ankara will be the biggest, with 3,724 beds and 938 clinics.
Türkiye had 1.1 million health care workers during the pandemic, 246,000 hospital beds, and 40,000 intensive care beds. The government saw it fit to build more hospitals to address the disease's burden in the health care sector.
A public-private partnership model was adopted to ensure quality service delivery. The city hospitals are leased to private companies, and the government only pays fees for medical imaging, laboratories, security, maintenance, and health care workers' salaries. This initiative has brought together multiple hospitals under one roof in an environment similar to state-of-art private medical facilities.
This project aims to improve health standards by significantly increasing hospital bed capacity and addressing a shortage of physicians.
Türkiye's health care system underwent a significant transformation in the early 2000s, and its good fight against COVID-19 was impressive.
