How to check whether a Turkish clinic is licensed to treat you

Ask the clinic for its International Health Tourism Authorisation Certificate, then check that the same facility appears on the Ministry of Health register. That is the whole method. Everything below is detail.

Turkish law requires a facility to hold an Uluslararası Sağlık Turizmi Yetki Belgesi before it may treat patients who travel to Türkiye for care. The Ministry publishes the list of holders. If a clinic cannot tell you its licence number, or the number does not match the register, stop and ask why before you pay anything.

Step one: ask for the certificate, not a screenshot of a logo

Request the certificate as a PDF. A logo on a website proves nothing. The document itself carries the facility's registered details, and it is the thing the register is built from.

healthturkey.co mirrors 6,402 of the Ministry's own PDF documents: authorisation certificates and operating licences. Each mirrored document is published with its SHA-256 hash and a signed W3C Verifiable Credential, so the file can be checked byte for byte. Be clear about what that means: the signature on those credentials belongs to healthturkey.co, not to the Ministry. We are confirming that the file we hold has not changed since we published it. We are not the Ministry and we do not issue licences.

Step two: search the register by company name

This is where most people go wrong. Clinics trade under a brand name and register under a company name, so a search for the brand may not match the register. A clinic advertising as one name may sit on the list under an entirely different legal entity.

Ask the clinic for the company name on its certificate, then search the register using that. If the two names differ, that is normal. What matters is that the certificate and the register entry describe the same facility.

Step three: read the entry properly

The register currently lists 4,403 facilities holding the authorisation. It covers 62 provinces and records 29,099 doctors.

Licence numbers are not uniform. Of the 4,403 listed facilities:

• 3,905 carry a licence number in the ST-0000 format.
• 374 are recorded with a longer document reference instead of an ST number.
• 124 are on the register with no licence number recorded at all.

Those last two groups are not necessarily a problem. A longer reference or a blank field can be how the record was entered, not a sign that something is wrong. But it does mean you cannot verify by number alone. Check the facility name, the province and the treatment category instead, and ask the clinic to explain any gap between what it sent you and what the register shows.

Step four: check the location and the treatment type

Geography is a useful cross-check. 2,101 listed facilities are in İstanbul and 507 are in Antalya. If a clinic tells you it is in one of those cities, it should appear in the corresponding list: clinics in İstanbul or clinics in Antalya.

Treatment type matters too. 1,245 of the listed facilities are dental facilities. If you have been quoted for dental work, the facility should appear in that category. You can browse by treatment to see how the register groups facilities.

Step five: check the language and accreditation fields

4,330 facilities list English among the languages their staff speak. That is a statement about language, not about clinical standards, and it should not be read as anything more.

243 facilities have a named accreditation on the official record. If a clinic tells you it is accredited, the register is where you confirm whether an accreditation is recorded and what it is called. If nothing is recorded, ask the clinic for the accreditation body's own reference.

What a licence proves, and what it does not

A licence proves one thing: the facility holds the authorisation Turkish law requires before it may treat patients who travel to Türkiye for care. That is a real and useful fact. It means the facility has cleared a regulatory threshold and appears on a government list.

It does not grade care. It does not tell you how good a surgeon is, how a clinic handles complications, what its aftercare looks like, or whether it is the right place for your particular case. The register shows a licence; it does not rank, score or recommend. Any site that turns a licence into a quality claim is telling you something the document does not say.

A licence answers "is this facility allowed to treat me?" It does not answer "should this facility treat me?"

If the facility is not on the register

Do not conclude that it is unlicensed. Absence can mean a different registered name, a spelling difference, a recent change of company details, or a record we have not yet mirrored. The register is a list of authorisation holders, and matching a brand to a company name is not always straightforward.

What you can do is ask the clinic for its certificate and its registered company name, then check both against the register yourself. If it still does not match, ask the clinic to explain in writing. A facility that holds the authorisation can normally show you where it sits on the list.

If you find a record on this site that looks wrong, incomplete or out of date, report a wrong record. We publish what the Ministry publishes and we mirror the documents behind it. We take no fee from any clinic, we book nothing, and we make no claim about quality of care. The value here is the licence and the document behind it, so you can check both before you send a deposit.