Photo: Charismaniac / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Türkiye has hosted the world’s largest migrant population for more than a decade. At 6.4 million registered migrants — predominantly Syrian refugees but also significant populations from Afghanistan, Iraq and Central Asian countries — the numbers have not plateaued. Neither has the strain on the health system.
- 6.4 million registered migrants in Türkiye — world’s largest
- Migrant Health Centres running at 140% capacity
- Antenatal care: 71% (2020) → 58% (2025) among Syrian women
- Community health mediator ratio: 1:800 (2020) → 1:1,400 (2025)
A new national assessment, conducted by the Turkish Public Health Agency in collaboration with UNHCR and IOM, documents that Migrant Health Centres — the dedicated primary care facilities established to serve refugees and migrants — are operating at an average of 140 per cent of designed capacity. In Istanbul, Gaziantep and Hatay provinces, several centres are processing more than twice their intended daily patient load.
The picture is particularly concerning for maternal health. Antenatal care coverage among Syrian women has declined from 71 per cent in 2020 to 58 per cent in 2025. The primary driver is not unwillingness to seek care but capacity constraints at facilities and a growing language mediation gap: community health mediators — trilingual professionals who serve as cultural and linguistic brokers — have not been recruited in proportion to the growth of the population they serve. In 2020 there was approximately one mediator per 800 registered migrants. In 2025 the ratio is one per 1,400.
The assessment notes that Türkiye’s Migrant Health Centre model was, when introduced in 2014, genuinely innovative — a facility type designed specifically for a migrant population, staffed with cultural and linguistic competence as a core requirement. The problem is not design failure but scale failure: the model has not expanded at the rate the population has grown.
Recommended responses include urgent recruitment of additional community health mediators, a redesign of referral pathways to reduce unnecessary specialised care visits, and a provincial capacity-sharing mechanism that enables facilities to request temporary surge staff before reaching crisis point.
PHIG is tracking the Turkish health system experience as a reference case for the region. The Caucasus countries — particularly Georgia and Armenia, which share migration-origin dynamics with several of Türkiye’s migrant communities — can draw direct lessons from both the innovations and the failures of the Turkish model.
Source: Turkish Public Health Agency / UNHCR / IOM National Assessment, August 2026.
Professor, David Tvildiani Medical University | Chair, Public Health Institute of Georgia | Founder, Accréditation Sans Frontières
