Primary Healthcare Services for Syrian Refugees in Turkey

Since 2011, Turkish social policy has faced an exogenous shock in the form of a wave of Syrian refugees fleeing war. Health services top the list of Syrians’ urgent needs. This paper examines how Turkey has regulated healthcare services provided for Syrian refugees living in its territory. Response initially relied on access to the Turkish general health system, combination of NGO-run clinics and health centers staffed by Turkish health workers. In 2017, the primary healthcare is is been replacing with a system of health centers staffed by Syrian professionals and funded largely by the EU. Once fully implemented, this new system will largely exclude NGOs.

We begin from the premise that the shock itself did not impose a specific response. Instead, we consider three explanatory factors for this policy: a growing realization of the long-term nature of the refugee situation; acknowledgement of policy failure linked to the resistance of both Turkish and Syrian patients to shared health facilities based on cultural, administrative and language problems and the availability of new resources in the form of EU assistance for refugee management. It concludes that all must be taken into consideration to understand the particular outcome that emerged as a joint product of initially independent strategies, the Turkish government, the European Union and carried out by NGOs. Fieldwork for the article was conducted in 2017 in Istanbul and Ankara. Information was collected through the authors’ semi-directed interviews with the government officials, NGO representatives, and Syrian physicians who are under temporary protected status.