History of the hospital

1954. The regional clinical hospital of the Talas valley opens in a group of three-storey pavilions south-west of the central square, with 300 beds.

1956. The hospital receives many of the wounded of the Talas riots. Its records are among the sources used by historians to count the casualties.

1970s. The maternity pavilion (1974) and the cardiology wing are built. The diagnostic building follows in 1979.

1992. From April the city is under siege. The hospital keeps working under artillery fire, with dwindling anaesthetics, blood and fuel for the generators; the surgical building is hit several times and the surgeons operate in its basement. On 3 May nurse Nazira Asanbaeva is killed when the hospital is shelled. In memory. 1992.

1990s. Many Russian-speaking doctors leave; the hospital struggles to keep its specialist departments open.

1995-2002. The hospital is rebuilt and re-equipped with US federal grants and loans of the territorial government. Residency programmes on the American model and exchanges with medical schools in the United States and Turkey begin. In the same years many young nurses leave for American hospitals (photo: departure from Talas, 1998).

2002. The Emergency and Trauma Center opens, with the helipad for evacuations from the mountains.

2007. During the siege of Talas the hospital again takes in the wounded. Nurse Asylkan Sydykova is killed; a ward of the hospital bears her name. The casualty side is run by the surgeon Dr Yosep Temirkulov.

2011. Dr Sartbai Tokonov's team carries out the first open-heart operation in the Zone.

2013. Dr Yosep Temirkulov becomes chief physician.

2015. The first MRI scanner in the Zone.

2016. The Cardiovascular Institute (Building D) opens with two catheterization laboratories.

2019. 65 years. The Faculty of Medicine of TSU publishes Sixty-Five Years of the Talas Regional Hospital, 1954-2019.

2020. The Infectious Diseases department takes the first patients with COVID-19. Its head, Dr Arstan Kalysov, dies in April, the first Iradi doctor to die of the disease.

2025. Deputy chief physician Dr Jamila Kubatova, a paediatrician of the hospital since 1990, is appointed Minister of Health.

From the book Sixty-Five Years of the Talas Regional Hospital, 1954-2019 (TSU Press, 2019) and the hospital's records.