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The average number of doctors in Turkey’s eastern and southeastern provinces is one per thousand inhabitants, while in some provinces the ratio is even lower, the Birgün daily reported on Monday, citing data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat).
The official data once again revealed the striking inequality in Turkey’s regional distribution of physicians and hospitals. While there is one general practitioner per thousand people in the eastern and southeastern provinces of Şanlıurfa, Bingöl, Bitlis, Muş, Siirt, Hakkari, Şırnak, Ağrı, Iğdır, Mardin and Batman is one, there are no specialists in some of the provinces.
The city with the largest number of physicians per thousand people is the capital of Ankara, with four doctors. It is followed by other western provinces such as İstanbul, İzmir, Eskişehir, Isparta, Trabzon and Edirne. In many cities in the Aegean, Mediterranean, Marmara and Black Sea regions, there are two physicians per thousand people.
A similar picture is reflected in the number of hospitals in Turkish provinces, with İstanbul having the highest number of 234 hospitals. It is followed by Ankara with 84 and İzmir with 63 hospitals. The eastern provinces of Kilis, Ardahan and Iğdır have the fewest number of hospitals.
Experts attribute the decrease in the number of physicians to poor working conditions, violence targeting doctors and an increasing number of doctors who leave Turkey for better opportunities abroad.
Diyarbakır Medical Chamber President Veysi Ülgen said new doctors are preparing to go abroad in their fourth or fifth year at university, adding that the main reason for this situation is the poor working conditions.
“Doctors feel uncomfortable when they don’t have a sense of security, so they want to practice their profession elsewhere. The doctors’ working environment needs to be improved,” he added.
He also criticized President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for angering the medical community in March 2022 by condemning an increasing number of Turkish doctors who were choosing to move to the private sector or go abroad for better job opportunities and saying they are free to go and that Turkey would find ways to make up for their loss instead of taking measures to prevent them from leaving.
Kubilay Yalçınkaya, from Turkey’s Health and Social Service Workers Union (SES), also told Birgün that the increase in the number of doctors moving to jobs in major cities or abroad is forcing patients to travel long distances for treatment in hospitals mostly located in city centers.
The Sözcü daily last week reported, citing Turhan Çömez, a lawmaker from the nationalist opposition İYİ (Good) Party, that the number of Turkish doctors who have chosen to go abroad for better job opportunities and working conditions has reached 15,000.
More and more doctors are moving overseas due to poor working conditions and acts of violence in Turkey, which has the fewest number of doctors in Europe when the populations of the countries are taken into consideration, according to 2021 data from Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union.
Medical professionals who envision their future in Europe, Canada, the US, the United Arab Emirates or Qatar include not only doctors working for state or university hospitals but also self-employed physicians.
The reasons for the doctors’ departures include the failure of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government to meet their demands for manageable workloads, increased security and better pay as well as incidents of physical violence against healthcare workers becoming a daily occurrence across the country.
The doctors’ departures are a sad indictment of Erdoğan, who has burnished his own reputation by expanding universal health care over his 20 years in power. But the strains of the overhauls wrought by Erdoğan, in addition to those brought by the pandemic and increasing inflation, have undermined the very professionals on whom the health system depends.
There are frequent reports about long waiting periods for crucial surgeries due to the insufficient number of doctors in some hospitals.