Hospital building emptied after cracks appear on walls

Patients, medical staff and equipment have been evacuated from one of the buildings of Istanbul University’s Cerrahpaşa Medical School Hospital due to security concerns after cracks began to appear on some columns and on the floors of buildings on Nov. 17.

“Cracks have formed in certain sections of the floors and some columns of the Istanbul University Cerrahpaşa Medical School in separate buildings that include Medical Oncology, Haematology and Dialysis Unit, Pediatric Polyclinic, the Otorhinolaryngology Polyclinic and the creche on Nov. 17. A team of experts are investigating the reasons behind this physical structural deformation,” read a written statement issued by the university’s rector.

A similar problem had also emerged in 2010, causing the Central Laboratory to be moved elsewhere, the statement said, according to the Doğan news agency.

“We came here for my wife’s treatment, however we learned that the service is being re-located,” Muammer Tosun, husband of a patient said. “We will probably go to another hospital.”

Meanwhile, doctors in the Cerrahpaşa and Çapa Hospitals will be going on a strike Tuesday to protest against their work conditions, low wages and the government’s health policies.

“This system aims to cheapen doctors’ labor. They want to push university teachers into the market as cheap labor and leave them no other chance but to work in international hospital chains,” doctors from the Cerrahpaşa and Çapa hospitals told the daily Milliyet’s columnist Fikret Bila.

The doctors have also rebuffed claims by Health Minister Recep Akdağ that they were discontent because they wanted to make money through working in private hospitals and clinics.

Private hospitals are allowed to charge much higher fees for a surgery, whereas the state pays far smaller sums for the same operation in university hospitals, the doctors said. The doctors said they were not even receiving enough pay to replace used materials and that university hospitals were being financially punished, Bila wrote.