Tekirdağ City Hospital, the latest addition to the government’s health care reforms, was inaugurated Friday in the eponymous province in the country’s northwest. An opening ceremony was held for the hospital that aims to make the province in Turkey’s Thrace region a health hub for nearby Balkan countries. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan attended the ceremony after he declared at an earlier event that the hospital was renamed Ismail Fehmi Cumalıoğlu Tekirdağ City Hospital, after the late doctor and politician who was a native of Tekirdağ.
The facility houses 124 clinics, 18 surgery rooms and 102 intensive care beds. Equipped with modern technology, the hospital, built on a space of 159,000 square meters (nearly 40 acres), has 486 beds. It has been dubbed the most advanced, integrated health facility in the region, which includes Bulgaria and Greece. The country hopes it will be a center of attraction for international health tourism. In the era of the coronavirus pandemic, it also stands out with its intensive care unit capacity.
Erdoğan said at the ceremony that Turkey was successful in the fight against the pandemic with its health care efforts, giving examples of hospitals opened in Istanbul at the height of the outbreak. He cited strong health infrastructure and free access to health care services for all citizens as factors in helping the fight against the pandemic.
The hospital boasts the latest technology in diagnosis, including a positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) unit and a Gamma camera unit, an imaging device used in nuclear medicine. It also has a seven-bed radioactive iodine treatment unit and a linear particle accelerator for the treatment of cancer patients. Built as “a smart structure,” the hospital saves on heating and cooling costs with trigeneration technology. It will both serve the people of Tekirdağ and the wider Thrace region, including Edirne and Kırklareli provinces.
