How to verify a clinic in Turkey is licensed for international patients

Find the clinic's exact legal name, then check that name against the Ministry of Health's list of facilities holding an International Health Tourism Authorisation Certificate (Uluslararası Sağlık Turizmi Yetki Belgesi). You can search the register directly on healthturkey.co, or go to the source: the Ministry's Health Tourism Department publishes the lists itself at shgmturizmdb.saglik.gov.tr. A match tells you the facility is legally authorised to treat patients who have travelled to Turkey for care. It tells you nothing about whether that care will be good.

What "licensed" actually means here

In Turkey, a health facility needs two separate things to legally treat you as a foreign patient who has travelled for care. The first is an ordinary operating licence, the kind every hospital or clinic needs to treat anyone, resident or not. The second is the International Health Tourism Authorisation Certificate, a specific permission issued on top of the operating licence that allows the facility to market to and treat patients who came from abroad for treatment. Under the regulation that has governed this since 26 April 2025 (Resmî Gazete, issue 32882), that certificate is issued by the Ministry of Health for health facilities, and by USHAŞ, the state health-tourism company, for intermediary organisations such as agencies and coordinators. A facility can hold a valid operating licence and still have no authorisation to take international patients. The two documents answer different questions, and only the second one is what people mean when they talk about a clinic being "approved for medical tourism."

Step 1: find the exact legal facility name

Clinics trade under a brand name designed for marketing and register under a separate legal company name. The two can differ substantially. A quote or a brochure will usually give you the brand. Ask directly, in writing, for the facility's full legal (registered) name and its address, and cross-check that name, not the brand, against the register. If a brand name returns no result, that is not proof the facility is unlicensed; it may simply mean you searched the wrong name.

Step 2: ask for the health tourism authorisation, specifically

Ask the clinic to send you a copy of its International Health Tourism Authorisation Certificate, or its certificate number. Be precise about what you are asking for, because several other documents get shown to patients as if they were equivalent and are not:

• Company or trade registration (ticaret sicili) — proves the business legally exists, says nothing about health authorisation.
• Travel agency registration (TÜRSAB) — relevant to an intermediary booking your trip, not to whether the treating facility is authorised.
• ISO certification — a management-systems standard, not a health-tourism authorisation and not specific to patient safety in this context.
• Membership of a trade association — membership is not a government authorisation.
• An award, a diploma on a wall, or a review score — none of these are issued by any authority that checks licensing.

None of the above substitutes for the authorisation certificate. If a clinic answers a request for the certificate by sending one of these instead, ask again for the specific document by name.

Step 3: check the Ministry's own record

The Ministry's Health Tourism Department (Sağlık Turizmi Daire Başkanlığı) keeps its own published lists, split by facility type — hospitals, medical centres, clinics, and other health facilities — at shgmturizmdb.saglik.gov.tr. healthturkey.co makes the same underlying information searchable by name, city, treatment category and licence number in one place, so you do not have to work through separate government lists by hand. Search by the legal name you collected in step 1, and if you have a city or treatment type, narrow by city or category to cut down false matches on common names.

Step 4: confirm where you will actually be treated

Some organisations that quote and coordinate treatment are intermediaries, not the treating facility itself. An intermediary can be entirely legitimate, but it is not where your procedure happens, and it is authorised under a different process (via USHAŞ) than the health facility is. Ask plainly: which specific facility, by its legal name and address, will carry out the procedure? If the answer is vague, or changes between conversations, that is worth pausing on. The facility that treats you is the one that needs the authorisation certificate, not the company that found you.

Step 5: verify the treating clinician separately

A facility's authorisation certificate says nothing about any individual doctor's qualifications, registration or disciplinary history. Checking the clinic and checking the clinician are two different tasks, and both matter. Do them separately.

What the certificate does and does not mean

The authorisation confirms the facility has met the Ministry's minimum requirements to operate in international health tourism: things like registering with the state's HealthTürkiye portal, running a dedicated international health tourism unit with at least one staff member who speaks a documented foreign language, and (for surgical and interventional procedures) arranging complication insurance. What it does not confirm is clinical quality, outcomes, or that any specific doctor is competent for your procedure. Treat it as a floor, not a ranking.

What changed under the 2025 regulation

The regulation published on 26 April 2025 replaced the previous 2017 rules and tightened several requirements. Existing authorised facilities and intermediaries were given six months to bring themselves into compliance with the new rules. Facilities carrying out surgical or interventional procedures in an operating-theatre setting must have complication insurance in place; the transitional deadline the Ministry set for this was 31 December 2025. Separately, hospitals, medical centres, laboratories and dialysis centres holding the authorisation certificate must obtain accreditation from TÜSKA, the national healthcare quality and accreditation institute, by 31 December 2026; other facility types instead need a Ministry-issued certification. None of these deadlines mean a facility is automatically unlicensed before them — they are phased-in requirements, not an immediate cut-off — but they do mean the paperwork behind a licensed facility should look different after those dates than it did before.

Warning signs worth investigating further

None of these prove a facility is unlicensed on their own, but each is worth a direct question: the clinic cannot produce a certificate number when asked twice; the legal name on any paperwork does not match the name you searched; the quote comes from an intermediary who will not confirm which facility will actually treat you; pressure to pay a deposit before you have seen the certificate; and communication only in the brand name, never the registered company name.

Verification checklist

What to do next

Get the facility's legal name and certificate number in writing before you agree to anything. Search that name on healthturkey.co or on the Ministry's own lists. If you cannot get a straight answer to "what is your registered legal name and certificate number," treat that as reason enough to look elsewhere.