Asst. Prof. Himmet Bora Uslu — Transplant Nephrologist, Istanbul

Asst. Prof. Himmet Bora Uslu is a nephrologist. He is a physician who specialises in kidney disease, not a surgeon who performs transplants, and his own profile states Nephrology as his specialty.

That distinction is worth understanding rather than skipping past, because patients assessing a transplant centre routinely look only at the surgeons.

A kidney transplant involves a surgeon for a few hours. The nephrologist is involved before it, during the assessment that decides whether you are a candidate and whether a donor is suitable, and afterwards for as long as the transplant works — adjusting immunosuppression against blood levels, detecting rejection early enough to treat it, and managing the blood pressure, infection risk and metabolic consequences that come with a transplanted kidney and the drugs that keep it.

In practice, most transplant recipients see a surgeon twice and a nephrologist for the rest of their lives.

So when you are assessing a centre, the strength of its nephrology service is at least as relevant as the reputation of its surgeons, and it is the part almost nobody asks about. Ask who will manage your immunosuppression, how often you will be seen in the first three months, and — critically, if you are travelling — how the centre expects that care to be handed over to a nephrologist in your own country.

His published education is Manisa Fatih Anatolian High School, then medicine at Cerrahpaşa School of Medicine at Istanbul University — his profile specifies the English-language programme. He trained in internal medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine at Istanbul School of Medicine, Istanbul University, and then in nephrology in the Division of Nephrology at Akdeniz University in Antalya.

That is the standard route to nephrology: a medical degree, then internal medicine, then nephrology as a subspecialty of it. It is a long training, and it is why nephrologists are physicians rather than surgeons — the discipline is built on managing disease over years rather than on operating.

His published posts are the Nephrology Clinic at Van Regional Teaching and Research Hospital, and the Nephrology Clinic at Okmeydanı Teaching and Research Hospital. He now practises at Liv Hospital Bahçeşehir, where he is listed under organ transplantation and internal medicine as well as nephrology.

His profile does not give years for any of these, so this page gives none. Where a hospital publishes a career without dates, the sequence is knowable and the timing is not.

His published interests are kidney transplantation; chronic renal disease, haemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis; and hypertension, haematuria, proteinuria, nephritic and nephrotic syndrome, and inherited renal disease.

That is a complete nephrology practice rather than a transplant-only one, which is normal and is arguably what you want. A nephrologist who also runs dialysis and manages chronic kidney disease sees the whole course of the illness, including the decisions that come before transplantation is on the table at all.

Not published, and therefore not stated here: any dates for his training or posts; professional society memberships; a registration number; the number of transplant patients he manages; and the languages he consults in. His profile lists no languages at all — we note that rather than assume, although his medical degree was taken in an English-language programme.

The last point is worth raising with the hospital directly if you do not speak Turkish. Post-transplant care involves detailed conversations about dosing and symptoms, repeatedly, and it is the part of the pathway where a language barrier does the most damage.