an organization · TurkeyTürkiye General Directorate of Health Services

The General Directorate of Health Services inside Türkiye's Ministry of Health, and its Health Tourism Department, which issues the authorisation certificate a facility must hold before it may treat an international patient. The instrument is the Uluslararası Sağlık Turizmi ve Turistin Sağlığı Hakkında Yönetmelik, published in the Resmî Gazete on 26 April 2025, No. 32882, whose MADDE 17 repeals the regulation of 13 July 2017 that most secondary writing still cites. The directorate licenses the facility; USHAŞ, the ministry's own international health services company, licenses the intermediary.

What this body publishes is a list, and the list is the rarest thing in this directory.

Four of them, in fact, all stamped 20 August 2026: 542 hospitals, 135 medical centres, 2,468 private physician offices and 1,581 other facilities. That is 4,726, a sum made here — the ministry prints no total. It publishes no count of authorised intermediaries anywhere that could be read.

The certificate carries obligations a patient would recognise. It cannot be transferred (MADDE 5(5)) and a separate one is needed for each branch (5(4)). Complication insurance is compulsory for anything done in an operating-theatre setting, with a deadline of 31 December 2025 (6(1)(c)). Accreditation by TÜSKA is required for hospitals, medical centres, medical laboratories and dialysis centres by 31 December 2026 (6(1)(b)). A holder may not buy intermediary services from an unlicensed party (6(1)(e)). Complications and medical malpractice sit expressly inside the holder's responsibility (6(3)) — a sentence with no counterpart in most of the world. The facility must run an international unit with a documented foreign-language speaker (MADDE 7) and register on the HealthTürkiye portal (8(4)); pricing is set by the ministry (11(1)). USHAŞ evaluates performance annually, with a three-month and then a six-month suspension and cancellation after a failed second control evaluation (MADDE 9), and a certificate lapses after a year of inactivity, with no new one for a year after that (MADDE 16).

Hair restoration got its own instrument. The Saç Ekimi Birimleri Hakkında Yönetmelik, Resmî Gazete of 6 May 2023, No. 32182, reserves the channel-opening stage to physicians holding the applicator certificate, lets assistants work only under a certified physician, caps one certified physician at five rooms, and allows one patient per room at a time. Every case is logged with technique, graft count, region, the names of the team, and photographs before and at 72 hours — with one carve-out: the six-month photograph is not required for a patient who came in under the international health tourism rules. The unit register is public. Breach draws a fine of 1 to 3 per cent of the previous month's gross service revenue, and on persistence the activity certificate is cancelled with no re-issue; inspection runs at least annually and unscheduled on complaint.

Inference — the register answers one question well and no other. It says whether a named facility holds the certificate on a given date. It rates nobody, publishes no outcome, and counts no operation. Set against most destinations in this directory that is still exceptional, because most publish no list at all: a reader can check a Turkish clinic's standing and cannot check a Mexican one's.

The national figure for the trade is not this directorate's either. It comes from the Turkish Statistical Institute's survey of departing visitors' stated purpose of visit, republished by USHAŞ with an income series attached: 1,398,580 for 2025, of which 250,401 were Turkish citizens resident abroad. Inference — a licensing register and a border survey measure two different things, and neither of them measures an operation.

A facility applies, is assessed against the conditions in MADDE 6, and is issued a certificate per branch that it cannot transfer. The ministry republishes the authorised lists as PDFs, which are the register: a facility not on them is not authorised, whatever its own site says. USHAŞ runs the annual performance evaluation and holds the suspension power; it also licenses the intermediaries, a function moved to it from the travel-agency system by the 2025 regulation. Hair transplant units are inspected at least once a year and on complaint.

As of 17 September 2026 the instrument in force is the 2025 regulation; the authorised-facility lists are stamped 20 August 2026; the complication-insurance deadline of 31 December 2025 has passed and the TÜSKA accreditation deadline of 31 December 2026 has not.

The repealed 2017 regulation stays in this project's source register, marked repealed, because a great deal of writing published since still cites it.