ASSESSMENT OF TÜRKİYE'S PROVINCES WITH HEALTH INFRASTRUCTURE INDICATORS USING DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS AND HEALTH INDEX

Health systems assessment is critical to ensure the sustainability of health services. The interest of researchers in analysing health systems, which intensified during the pandemic, is motivated by the opportunity to identify weaknesses and propose changes. Health systems analyses provide valuable feedback for policy makers, especially in developing countries, which struggle with obstacles such as limited resources, financial constraints and deficiencies in health infrastructure. As a developing country, Türkiye has been striving to ensure equal access to health services through its health transformation programme. In the last decade, developments such as the increase in Syrian migrants and economic contraction have negatively affected this effort. This situation motivates the need to analyse the current situation in the Turkish health system and provide suggestions for improvement. The literature on the Turkish health system mostly focuses on broad health system indicators such as health service accessibility, efficiency, quality and user satisfaction. This study focuses on assessing the accessibility of health infrastructure resources. In the study, health infrastructure indicators related to the Turkish health system are evaluated on a province basis for the period from 2012 to 2021. The evaluation is based on the descriptive statistics of the dataset and the province-based health index. The findings show changing trends and gaps in access to health services with the increase in population in the period 2012-2021. Some variables (e.g. population per hospital and population per bed) show low variances, while others (e.g. population per intensive care bed) show large differences. These differences may indicate unequal development and investment in health infrastructure. For policy makers, they emphasise the need to develop policies to address these inequalities and to distribute resources equitably. Analysing the health index values shows inequalities in access to health resources in different provinces of Türkiye as a score. In particular, while some provinces such as Isparta and Bolu stand out with consistently high index scores, lower index scores in other provinces such as Şanlıurfa, Mardin, Ağrı and Şırnak indicate that inequalities in access to health services are faced. This index identifies changes and gaps in the distribution of health resources and shows policy makers priority areas for intervention.