WE ARE THE LEADER OF THE REGION IN HEALTH AND EDUCATION.
Dr Mustafa Enis Arabacı, Chairman of the Board of Directors of PARKHAYAT Group, evaluated his works in the field of health and education to Kocatepe Newspaper. Hosted by Kocatepe Newspaper owner Sezer Küçükkurt, Editor-in-Chief Burak Aydın and Columnist Murat Arısoy, PARKHAYAT Group Chairman Dr. M. Enis Arabacı also made evaluations on the agenda. Stating that PARKHAYAT Group continues to grow with its brand value and that they are moving towards the goal of becoming the leading institution of the region in the field of health and education, Arabacı stated that Turkey has been struggling for independence in the last two years, especially after the period after 17-25 December and the 15 July Coup Attempt, and has been very successful in this. Prof. Dr. Mustafa Enis Arabacı said, "There are problems in the economic field, but these will come and go, nothing is more important than the independence of the state and the integrity of the country."
"WE SUCCEEDED IN THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE"
Kocatepe: What are your thoughts on the period Turkey is going through? Mustafa Enis Arabacı: Turkey has struggled for independence in the last two years, especially after the period after 17-25 December and the 15 July Coup Attempt, and has been very successful in this struggle. I think that everything that needs to be done has been done since the trench incidents. The situation of our state and our country is more important than the economy and everything else. Other issues will recover in time, independence and the integrity of the homeland are priorities. I think that terrorist incidents will end in the short term. I am of the opinion that some moves that we think put Turkey in difficulty can be moves that grow Turkey.
"WE ARE IMPROVING OUR SERVICE NETWORK AND PERSONNEL STRUCTURE"
Kocatepe: PARKHAYAT Group is a group that makes a significant contribution to Afyonkarahisar employment. How many employees do you have? Mustafa Enis Arabacı: Since June 2006, we have undertaken the task of hospital management together with our partners and our team. Currently, we continue our services in the form of two hospitals, two schools, a medical centre and we are trying to expand the service network a little more every year. In today's economic conditions, we know that businesses also have difficulties. In this period, we are doing our best to carry out our business without sacrificing quality and protecting employment. We endeavour not to lower the bar in terms of the number of employees. Currently, there are 846 employees in total in our organisations. 645 of this number work in Afyon. I do not know if there are any private enterprises that employ more personnel than us in terms of numbers, but we are the leading organisation in Afyonkarahisar in terms of insurance premiums. Because we employ a highly paid mass. Kocatepe: Could you tell us about the innovations that PARKHAYAT Group will bring to Afyonkarahisar and its region in 2017? Mustafa Enis Arabacı: We are a reference hospital in many fields in Afyon. In branches such as cardiology, cardiovascular surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, general surgery, urology, ophthalmology, we are the hospital that receives the highest number of applications for highly difficult and vital procedures and perform these procedures the most with today's technologies. The responsibility for this is of course very high. It is important to have people coming to Afyon to receive health services from the region. We are starting Nuclear Medicine service from next month. Our Nuclear Medicine Centre, where scintigraphy is performed with a new model device, will be put into service. We are renovating a place in the hospital and establishing an Oncology Unit. By starting a medical oncologist and a suitable team; we will also start to provide Oncology services. Kocatepe: Is there any service that we cannot provide in the field of health within your Group? Mustafa Enis Arabacı: We will have a deficiency regarding radiotherapies. Afyon Kocatepe University is doing that. Other than that, we do not have any deficiency.
"WE WORK NOT WITH MATERIAL EXPECTATIONS, BUT WITH SPIRITUAL SATISFACTION"
Kocatepe Mustafa Enis Arabacı is a name that has proven himself both in his profession, personal characteristics and financial structure. In such a period, you are aspiring for a stressful job with your savings and capital. In other words, why are you in such a struggle when a more comfortable life is possible with the means you have? Mustafa Enis Arabacı: When I hear this question, I feel like saying "so there are people who understand us and can observe our situation". These kinds of things are difficult to get results when they are done for money. Some people are satisfied when they do some things, they cannot stay idle. Being successful and contributing something in the field of health makes us happy. We have a really responsible and risky task. We provide both hotel and hospitality services here. We serve in an environment where operations are performed at any moment, diagnoses are made, and vital developments are constantly taking place. In Afyon alone, 25 thousand people come to our hospital for outpatient clinic and many people come for surgery. There is a very high tempo. I think the most important problem of the health system in Turkey at the moment is this high tempo. The system is not able to clearly distinguish between important and unimportant, quality and poor quality, reliable and unreliable. The reimbursement system works with a logic that calculates according to the number, not according to the difficulty or quality of the work. Hospitalisation is a field with a high agenda. Every day we read in the newspapers and watch on television, there are news about medical practices that have been done right or wrong. There are also routine inspections by a ministry almost every week, and some of our employees leave their main jobs and deal with these works. We do not have any deficiencies in these inspections, but I do not think that there is an organisation that is inspected as unnecessary as private hospitals. A person who can manage a hospital must have a strong mental structure. It is a really difficult organisation. ; From our point of view, the job we know best is being a doctor. In fact, we are trying to do the job we know best. We want to do the best job. We are doing a stressful job. It is also a social job, we also get a lot of blessings. There is a situation with pros and cons. It is not possible to carry out these jobs properly without creating a certain economic added value. However, hospitalisation with purely financial concerns does not lead to good results. ; We aspire to this work with the idea that we should do our job right first, let's do our job right first, the rest will come anyway, and maybe for spiritual satisfaction rather than material satisfaction.
"UNFAIR COMMENTS ARE MADE ABOUT PRIVATE HOSPITALS"
Kocatepe: Recently, the public has developed an image of private hospitals as money-grabbing traps. Do private hospitals seek to grab money from incoming patients? Mustafa Enis Arabacı: People are no longer obliged to go to a certain hospital. Aren't there many alternatives in health? There are also in Afyon. When you look at a 5 kilometre radius, there is a large University Hospital, there is a modern State Hospital, there is us, there are two other private hospitals. There are many options; people go to private hospitals knowing that they are charged a difference. It is an unfair comment. In addition, if you look at the private hospitals in other provinces across Turkey, you will see that the differences received by private hospitals in Afyon are very low. Considering the economic situation of private hospitals, most of them have debts. Medical applications are very costly. I think those who speak like this are making an unfair comment. If they know the details of the business, they would not think so. I am also a member of the board of directors of the Private Hospitals Association; We have been working with SSI prices that have not changed for 11 years. For example, SGK pays 25tl for a paediatric examination, pays 28tl for a paediatric examination, pays 31 tl for a gynaecological examination, you will be surprised at this fee, but the blood tests, X-rays and ultrasounds are included. In other words, he says, do the examination with this 25tl, do the analyses, I can't give anything else. It also takes 15 tl participation share from the patient. It takes this share through us and then collects it from us. The bed fee for one night is 30 tl. An appendicitis operation is 435, a birth is between 450 -520 TL. Not to be mistaken, 8% VAT is added to these. As you can see, SGK receives services from us at astonishing prices. If there are those who think that SGK pays and you are grabbing money from us, they probably do not master these details and do us an injustice. At the beginning of each year, we look at whether the state will raise these prices this year, but in vain, we have been serving at the same prices for years. Expectations have come to naught this year. When these prices first started, the minimum wage was 300 tl, now it is 1404 tl, but the state still receives health services from us mainly at the prices of 11 years ago. If there was no SGK, these hospitals would not have grown so much in time, but we really serve at very cheap prices according to today's conditions. These wages are the lowest wages in OECD countries. They are many times lower than European countries. We stay within the legal difference limits for our hospital. In some branches, we charge difference fees below the limits. If we do not receive these differentials, we cannot provide this service. We have to close the hospital. When you compare a public hospital with a private hospital, you buy the land for the hospital yourself, you build the building yourself, you buy the medical equipment yourself, you pay the salaries of the staff yourself, you have a tax obligation. In other words, this cannot work without charging a difference; in order to make it work without charging a difference, the state should seriously revise the service fees. According to a recent study, the cost of an equal patient to the state is one unit in private hospitals and two units in public hospitals. To make a long story short, private hospitals, especially in Anatolia, are currently bearing the burden of the health system with almost no burden on the state, and it is not known how long they will last at these prices. Kocatepe: Why are private hospitals preferred? Mustafa Enis Arabacı: Why do people go private when there are so many hospitals? The most important expectation of people in health care is to receive a reliable and correct service in the most comfortable way. This requires the right hospital building. It is necessary to have a vision and organisation in accordance with international standards and to have a medical device infrastructure that includes up-to-date technology. It also requires qualified physicians and health workers and a strict self-regulation. If even one of these is missing, things may not go as you want. I should also say without forgetting "unlimited goodwill. You must have unlimited goodwill in this business, you will not make any small calculations. We try to provide these as much as we can, we provide fast service, we take patient and patient relatives' expectations and complaints very seriously. We make the physician multiple choice. I don't appoint the person I don't want to be examined myself. The citizen is also aware of this. The devices we use and who the physician is are important. In the recent quality evaluations conducted by the Ministry of Health, we received 95 points in Afyon and 88 points in Akşehir despite being a new hospital. Brand perception is also important. PARKHAYAT has become a good brand. Our patients come to a physician who is not known in Afyon with confidence thanks to the brand created by our hospital.
"WE TAKE COMPLAINTS INTO CONSIDERATION"
Kocatepe What are the most complained about and most admired things in your organisation? Mustafa Enis Arabacı: There are not many complaints. Although we can perform an MRI in one day, sometimes they want it to be performed at that time. There are some complaints about missed appointments. No matter how much training is provided, there may be complaints about staff communication. There are more things that are liked. We take complaint boxes very seriously. We analyse whatever is written there and take necessary action. In those boxes, 80-85 per cent are thanked. The most common complaint was about the ultrasound queue. We solved that too. It is said that if you hire one more physician, the citizen does not know the rules here, how many physicians I will work with depends entirely on the planning of the ministry, I cannot hire physicians according to my head, I cannot increase the number.
"WE WANT TO CREATE THE BEST SCHOOL IN THE REGION"
What is the latest situation about your hospital in Kocatepe Akşehir? Mustafa Enis Arabacı: I go to Akşehir at least once a week. We have completed one year there. Our perception among the local people and the bureaucracy in the centre of Konya is very good. They encountered a much better hospital than they expected. Apart from Akşehir, patients from neighbouring districts and provinces also started to come. I think that this year, with a few extra moves, the hospital will be well established. We have around 210 employees in Akşehir. The number of active physicians is 25. We make around 12 thousand polyclinics per month. Sultandağı has started to go there rather than Afyon. Kocatepe: In addition to health, we also see the name Park in education. We see that your successful and disciplined structure is also reflected in TED College. How did the initiative at TED start when you had so much on your plate? Mustafa Enis Arabacı: We will graduate about 210 students from Park Health College this year. If we had not entered the Health College business 3.5 years ago, we would not have mastered the details of education and we might have hesitated about becoming a candidate for TED. At that time, we saw that some hospitals other than us were also involved in health education. The number of auxiliary health personnel in our country is really inadequate, and we have experienced the difficulty of this. We entered with the idea that we should train staff who would work in our own organisation. When we opened our school, Health Colleges were very popular. Over the years, their number has decreased in Turkey and they have turned into schools where those who provide really good service stay. There was no nurse assistant branch in Turkey. Many countries have this branch; Turkey needs to increase the number of graduates in these branches in order to provide health services more efficiently. We have started to evaluate our own team in the training. Internships are also productive. We already have very successful students. As for your main question, when we started to learn a little bit about education, when the Afyon Education Foundation was not fully ready to make the expected renovation of TED College and changed its mind about managing the school, we started to receive news about the transfer of TED Afyon College. At that time, other companies also negotiated with AEV, but it was up to us to take over TED Afyon College. Of course, we had meetings with TED headquarters first. First, we made an education and training cooperation agreement with the Turkish Education Association for TED Afyon College and then we agreed with AEV. When we took over TED Afyon College, we had not planned to be involved in a business as large as the construction we have now realised. Moreover, we never thought that we would make the expenditure we are making now. However, after the handover, we expanded our research and travelled around the newly built TED Colleges. TED has its own building standards. We also have perfectionism. We missed a little bit of adjustment to comply with them, so our goal became to create one of the best campus schools in our country. We made a wide revision in the existing buildings so that only the columns would remain. We have added 3 new blocks to the building and we are about to finish the sports hall. Our school has become a school building with a capacity of 1000 students. We have strengthened the education staff. We get very good results in exams. For example, we are the first in Afyonkarahisar province in TEOG. It was the same last year; I can say that making such an investment is not only for the purpose of making money. We can perceive it as a social responsibility project. In such cases, we want to carry out the work without making a loss. If an added value is produced in the economic sense, it would please us. Our priority is to create the best school in the region, to raise individuals who are loyal to their homeland and nation and who can compete with the world in every field.
ATTENTION SHOULD BE PAID TO QUALITY IN EDUCATION
Kocatepe: Is there a balance between potential and demand in the field of education in Afyon? Mustafa Enis Arabacı: There has been a private school boom not only in Afyon but all over Turkey. The Ministry of National Education has a plan for 15 per cent of students to attend private schools by 2023. Turkey is still far from this with 7.6 per cent. In this sense, there is no significant problem in terms of the balance between potential and demand. Many institutions are opening and some are closing. Much attention should be paid to the following
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