Prof. Dr. Halil Erbiş — Transplant Surgeon, Istanbul

Halil Erbiş read medicine at Dokuz Eylül University Faculty of Medicine in Izmir, between 1991 and 1998. He completed his general surgery residency at Pamukkale University Faculty of Medicine in Denizli, between 2001 and 2007.

His early specialist posts were in the Turkish state hospital system: Erciş State Hospital in Van from 2007 to 2009, then Gölhisar State Hospital in 2009. He returned to Pamukkale University as an assistant professor in general surgery from 2009 to 2013, and spent 2011 to 2012 as a clinical fellow at Şişli Florence Nightingale Hospital in Istanbul.

From 2013 he held a post in the department of general surgery at Akdeniz University in Antalya, attached to the Prof. Dr. Tuncer Karpuzoğlu Organ Transplantation Centre — one of the longer-established transplant programmes in Türkiye. He now practises at Biruni University Hospital in Istanbul.

That sequence is worth reading as a transplant career rather than a list. Transplant surgery is not a specialty a general surgeon enters directly; it is entered through a high-volume unit, over years, under people who already do it. The Akdeniz post is the part of this history that says most about how he trained for the work he now does.

He holds a Clinical Research and Good Clinical Practice training certificate dated 2017.

His published areas of practice are liver diseases, bile duct and gallbladder disease, hepatobiliary surgery, liver transplantation, kidney transplantation, pancreas transplantation, pancreatic disease, laparoscopic surgery and oncological surgery.

That combination is characteristic rather than unusual, and understanding why helps in reading any transplant surgeon's profile. Liver transplantation sits inside hepatopancreatobiliary surgery — the same anatomy, the same vascular and biliary reconstruction, much of the same operative technique. A surgeon who transplants livers is nearly always a surgeon who also resects them for cancer and repairs bile ducts, because those are the operations that build and maintain the skill.

The kidney and pancreas transplantation in his list reflects the structure of Turkish transplant units, which commonly run kidney and liver programmes side by side under one organ transplantation centre rather than as separate services.

He is listed in both the liver transplant centre and the organ transplant centre at his current hospital.

He appears in the indexed medical literature under his own name, in transplantation.

This is worth more than it might seem when you are assessing a surgeon from another country. A hospital profile is written by the hospital. A paper indexed in PubMed is written by the clinician, carries their institutional affiliation at the time, is dated, and cannot be quietly revised later. It is the one part of a surgeon's record that does not depend on trusting whoever published the page you are reading — including this one.

His indexed work includes co-authorship with Ertan Emek, his colleague at the same hospital, on a 2026 paper concerning analgesia management in paediatric liver transplantation recipient surgery, published in Minerva Anestesiologica. Co-authorship of that kind is also independent corroboration that two clinicians work together where both profiles say they do.

If you want to read the work yourself rather than take a summary of it, search his surname in PubMed. That is a check anybody can perform, and it is the check we would rather you made than believe this page.

Being direct about the gaps, because they are the things you would most want to know.

How many transplants he has performed. Not published, by him or by his hospital, so it does not appear here. Ask directly, and ask for last year rather than a career total.

His own outcomes. Not published. Graft survival is usually reported by centre rather than by surgeon, which is reasonable — transplantation is a team result — but it means an individual surgeon's record is rarely available at all.

Whether he would be your surgeon. A named surgeon on a hospital's website is not a commitment that they will perform your operation. Ask who will operate, and get the answer in writing.

Languages beyond English. His profile lists English. It does not list others, so we list none.

Registration number. Not published on his profile, which is normal for Turkish hospital listings. Turkish clinicians are registered with the Turkish Medical Association and provincial medical chambers; ask for the registration if you want to check it independently.