Partially opened in August, Konya City Hospital was formally inaugurated by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Friday in the eponymous central province. It is the 16th city hospital Turkey has opened recently as part of its new health care concept. The opening comes at a time of heightened need for more beds as the country combats the coronavirus pandemic, Trend reports citing Daily Sabah.
A sprawling complex with 1,250 beds, including 256 intensive care beds, the hospital is actually a composite of multiple hospitals specialized in different branches of medicine.
Located at the heart of Konya, which is situated south of the capital Ankara, the hospital boasts 380 clinics and 49 surgery rooms over a space of 421,566 square meters (104 acres). A trigeneration system ensures the complex’s power supply is uninterrupted.
The hospital started operating with 838 beds on Aug. 5 and has since seen an immense flow of patients and about 6,000 surgeries. More importantly, it relieved other hospitals in the province of patient overload by serving as the main hospital to treat patients for diseases and illnesses other than COVID-19.
“City hospitals are the peak of our health care system, and Konya hospital is among the biggest of them,” Erdoğan said at the opening ceremony.
Speaking at the ceremony, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said Turkey saw a decline in cases while the country's hospital bed capacity was not overwhelmed, citing that COVID-19 patients currently occupied 44% of total hospital beds. “Investments in health care, a strong infrastructure and devoted health care workers who make sacrifices in the face of the outbreak help us to carry out a more efficient struggle against the pandemic,” Koca said.
Turkey’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 Turkey’s health care capacity in a time of crisis. When the pandemic broke out, Turkey 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.
The city hospital project is part of the government’s ambition to increase bed capacity and address a shortage of doctors in cities with a high population density. They are mainly located in suburban areas and operated with a private-public partnership model. They are leased to private companies, and the government pays a fee for medical imaging, laboratories, security, maintenance and health care workers' salaries.