What an International Health Tourism Authorisation Certificate is

An International Health Tourism Authorisation Certificate (Uluslararası Sağlık Turizmi Yetki Belgesi) is the specific Turkish government permission required before a facility or an intermediary may legally operate in international health tourism — that is, treat or coordinate treatment for someone who travelled to Turkey specifically for care. It sits on top of a facility's ordinary operating licence, which every hospital or clinic needs regardless of whether it treats foreign patients at all. The authorisation is the narrower, additional permission that applies specifically to treating patients who came from abroad for that purpose.

Who issues it, and why the distinction matters

The regulation currently in force — Uluslararası Sağlık Turizmi ve Turistin Sağlığı Hakkında Yönetmelik, published in the Resmî Gazete on 26 April 2025, issue 32882 — splits authorisation by who is applying. Health facilities (hospitals, medical centres, clinics, and other treating facilities) are authorised directly by the Ministry of Health. Intermediary organisations — agencies, coordinators and similar businesses that arrange treatment but do not themselves provide it — are instead authorised by USHAŞ (Uluslararası Sağlık Hizmetleri A.Ş.), a company set up by the state specifically for this purpose. The 2025 regulation also dropped an older requirement that an intermediary first be a licensed travel agency, opening the intermediary role to businesses that are not travel agencies at all.

This split matters to a patient for one practical reason: you need to know which of the two you are dealing with. An intermediary can be entirely properly authorised and still not be the organisation that will treat you. If a company sends you a certificate, check first whether it is a facility certificate or an intermediary certificate, and ask directly: are you the healthcare facility, or are you arranging my treatment at a facility elsewhere?

What an authorised facility must actually do

Holding the certificate is not a one-off box-tick; the regulation attaches ongoing obligations to it. Every authorised facility must run a dedicated international health tourism unit responsible for admitting, registering, treating, invoicing and discharging international patients, and for coordinating with intermediaries. That unit must have at least one member of staff whose foreign-language ability is documented, and the unit's staff must be reported to the relevant provincial health directorate through the state's tracking system. Facilities and intermediaries must also register on the government's HealthTürkiye portal and keep their listed information current, and facilities carrying out surgical or interventional procedures in an operating-theatre setting must arrange complication insurance — a requirement the regulation gave existing facilities until 31 December 2025 to meet. Patients are also entitled to a genuinely itemised invoice on request: a breakdown of services and their prices, medicines and supplies used, and test results, provided free of charge.

Authorisation versus accreditation — these are not the same document

The regulation layers a second, separate requirement on top of authorisation: accreditation. Hospitals, medical centres, laboratories and dialysis centres that hold the health-tourism authorisation certificate must additionally obtain accreditation from TÜSKA (Türkiye Sağlık Hizmetleri Kalite ve Akreditasyon Enstitüsü), the national institute responsible for healthcare quality accreditation in Turkey; other authorised facility types instead need a certification issued directly by the Ministry. The transitional deadline set for this accreditation requirement is 31 December 2026. Authorisation and accreditation ask different questions — authorisation is permission to operate in health tourism at all; accreditation is a quality-standards audit layered on top of it — and a facility can legitimately hold one without (yet) holding the other during the transition period, since the deadline has not yet passed.

Does the certificate guarantee good treatment?

No, and it is worth being precise about what it actually answers. The certificate confirms that a named, specific legal entity has met the Ministry's or USHAŞ's minimum administrative and safety requirements to operate in international health tourism at the time it was issued. It says nothing about the individual doctor who will treat you, nothing about the outcome of your specific procedure, and nothing about whether the facility is a good fit for your case. Two facilities can hold the identical certificate and differ enormously in what they actually do day to day. Treat it the way you would treat a business's licence to operate — a floor below which it is not supposed to fall, not a ranking of how well it performs above that floor.

Why the two-authority split exists

Splitting authorisation between the Ministry and USHAŞ is not a bureaucratic accident. A health facility and an intermediary organisation do fundamentally different things: one provides treatment, the other arranges it, often without ever employing a clinician or running a treatment room. Regulating both through the same process would blur that distinction on paper, which is exactly what patients need not to happen when they are trying to work out who is actually responsible for their care. In practice this means a single booking can legitimately involve two separately authorised parties — an intermediary that found you, quoted you and organised your travel, and a facility, authorised separately by the Ministry, that actually performs the procedure. Neither authorisation stands in for the other, and asking to see "the certificate" without specifying which one you mean is a question that can be answered honestly with the wrong document.

A sensible order of checks

Confirm the facility's exact legal name first, since a marketing brand and a registered company name are frequently different. Then check that legal name against the authorisation register — healthturkey.co makes this searchable by name, city and treatment type. Separately, ask whether the facility (for the relevant facility types) holds TÜSKA accreditation, since that is a different document with a different, later deadline. Then verify the individual treating clinician, which is a wholly separate check from verifying the facility. Only after all of that does it make sense to discuss any commercial terms.

FAQ

Does every clinic treating foreign patients need this certificate?

Any facility legally treating patients who travelled to Turkey specifically for care needs the authorisation. A facility without it may still be a properly licensed general healthcare provider — the operating licence and the health-tourism authorisation are separate documents — but it is not supposed to be marketing to or treating patients under the international health tourism route without the authorisation.

Is an intermediary's certificate the same as a facility's certificate?

No. They are issued by different authorities (USHAŞ for intermediaries, the Ministry for facilities) and certify different things. An intermediary's certificate says nothing about the facility where you will actually be treated.

Can I check this myself?

Yes. The Ministry's Health Tourism Department publishes its own lists, and healthturkey.co mirrors the same underlying register in a single searchable form by name, city, treatment and licence number.

What about emergency care if I am already in Turkey as a tourist?

The regulation treats that as a separate category — "turistin sağlığı" (tourist health) rather than international health tourism — and it is covered in more detail in this guide.

What to do next

Ask any facility or intermediary for its certificate number and its legal entity name in writing, check it against the register, and note whether you are looking at a facility certificate or an intermediary certificate before you go any further.