Factors Effecting the Locations of Public and Private Hospitals in Turkey

Health is the basic condition of economic growth and the investment on health facilities should be parallel to other investments.. In general, the distribution of those facilities will encourage balanced economic prosperity. After 1990’s privatization of health facilities had started but very little research done about factors affecting the outcome. In this paper the distribution of public and private health facilities are investigated with respect to, socio-demographic, economic and education levels of provinces. Distribution of Public and Private Hospital beds with respect to province population throughout time is analyzed. Public hospitals are generally distributed with balanced population except some southeast and east Anatolian provinces. Private hospitals are five times less the volume of public hospitals and 15 provinces have no private hospitals. Most of the private hospitals are located in a few higher income provinces and rest is distributed by population. Regression model the number of hospital beds are taken as dependent variable and population of provinces, income and education level are taken as independent variables. According to analysis, public hospitals are affected by population and education levels. For private hospitals only population is found to be effecting the distribution. So, in parallel to health facilities, distribution of education and job opportunities should be considered throughout Turkey.