Assoc. Prof. Ali Özer, MD — Transplant Surgeon, Istanbul

Ali Özer qualified in medicine at Ankara University Faculty of Medicine in 2005, and completed general surgery training at Uludağ University Faculty of Medicine in Bursa in 2013.

He joined Acıbadem Healthcare Services in 2016, and since 2017 has held a faculty post at the Acıbadem Mehmet Ali Aydınlar University Vocational School of Health Services. His profile describes him as having more than twenty years in medicine.

The three years between completing general surgery training in 2013 and joining Acıbadem in 2016 are not accounted for on his published profile, and this page does not fill them in. That period is often where a transplant surgeon does subspecialty training, so it is a fair question to put to the hospital.

The teaching post is worth noting for a different reason than prestige. A clinician who holds a university appointment is accountable to an institution beyond the hospital that employs them, and that appointment is verifiable through the university rather than only through the hospital's own page.

His stated specialty is endocrine surgery together with organ transplantation, and he is listed in the liver transplant centre. His published clinical expertise covers liver cancer, liver failure, and pancreatic, liver and biliary tract disease, alongside endocrine and thyroid procedures, hernia repair and haemorrhoidal treatment.

That pairing — liver transplantation with liver cancer and liver failure — is the clinically coherent one. Hepatocellular carcinoma and decompensated liver failure are two of the main reasons a liver transplant is performed at all, so a surgeon working in a liver transplant centre is normally managing the disease as well as the operation.

His profile names membership of the Turkish Organ Transplantation Association and the Turkish Surgical Association. Both maintain their own membership records, which makes these among the few credentials on a clinician page that a reader can confirm without going through the hospital.

His profile states Turkish and English, and that Acıbadem provides interpreters for other languages.

Transplant volumes. Not published, in total or for last year. Ask the centre, and ask for last year specifically.

Outcomes. No graft survival or individual outcome figure is published. Graft survival is normally a centre statistic rather than a surgeon one, which is reasonable, but it means there is nothing individual to report.

The 2013–2016 period. Absent from the record, as above.

Registration number. Not published, which is standard for Turkish hospital listings. Ask if you want to check his registration independently.

Whether he would be your surgeon. A name on a hospital's website is not a commitment to operate. Ask who will, and ask in writing.

If you are being assessed for a liver transplant, the questions that matter most are how many the centre performed last year, its one-year graft survival and how it is collected, and — where a living donor is involved — who assesses the donor and whether that team is independent of the recipient's.