During his visit to Eskişehir, Health Minister Dr. Fahrettin Koca met with medical students, attended ambulance delivery ceremony and had lunch with children with SMA and Down syndrome and their families.
Following his visit to Governor Özdemir Çakacak, Drç Koca made a press statement and answered questions of the members of the press.
“We cannot approve violence against anyone, and violence against healthcare professionals is a very sad issue. We made a regulation and started implementation thereof to prevent such actions. Ministry of Interior Affairs and Ministry of Justice are also working on a circular to provide better clarification. There is also another project to ensure penalization of the perpetuators of general violence, robbery and theft crimes when they are convicted of less than 2-year imprisonment, instead of converting it into pecuniary fine. Without doubt, our primary responsibility is to create an environment where patients and physicians trust one another. We aim to ensure delivery of health services in a trustworthy environment” said Dr. Koca.
Following his statement, Dr. Koca attended the ambulance delivery ceremony at Eskişehir City Hospital. He provided some clarifications about the City Hospital explaining that it reached the occupancy rate of 82.2% in a very short time and city hospitals are planned to become a base of health in their respective regions. One of the 9 city hospitals opened so far, Eskişehir City Hospital has 1048 bed capacity and 35 operating rooms, established on the closed area of 333 thousand sqm. City hospitals are planned to provide all kinds of services in that it will not be necessary to transfer the patient to any other health facility for any health service.
Dr. Koca also mentioned about transfer of the patients in ambulance helicopters and planes free of charge, - the only country providing such services without any charge, which is a great achievement considering the 82 million population of Turkey.
Dr. Koca subsequently met with medical students of Osmangazi University Faculty of Medicine, and made the following statements.
“Being a medical student requires both becoming successful and becoming self-sacrificing. In Turkey, you need to leave millions of the students behind to be able to study medicine. In 2018, there was quota of 14.643 for faculties of medicine, 6.104 for faculties of dentistry, 14.635 for nursing program and 3.280 for midwifery. The number of doctors reached 150 thousand. Although the figures may seem strikingly high at first glance, we are still behind the developed countries in terms of the number of doctors and beds considering our population.
Being a doctor requires to have superior qualifications. Being donated with information only cannot make you a qualified doctor. Rapid developments in technology may decrease the role of doctors to the level of technician. However, we cannot and should not disregard the fact that medicine is a human-centered science and profession of medicine is an art dedicated to humankind. Therefore, I believe that medical training needs a new vision, and it is required to think about and work on ‘human sciences in medicine’.”
The meeting ended with the question-answer session.
© 2025 Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Health All rights reserved.
