Salih Gülten, MD — Transplant Coordinator, Bursa

This page begins with the distinction because it is the most useful thing on it. Salih Gülten is published as working in transplant coordination, not as a transplant surgeon. If you are looking for the person who will perform an operation, that person is somebody else.

That is not a lesser role. In many transplant programmes the coordinator is the single most consequential person in the process for a patient and a donor, and the one they deal with most.

A transplant coordinator is responsible for the pathway rather than the incision: assessing and preparing donors and recipients, sequencing the tests, assembling the documentation an ethics committee requires, arranging the committee submission itself, and managing the logistics around the operation and the follow-up. In cross-border cases — which is what this platform exists for — the coordinator is usually the person who tells a family what their destination country actually requires, and whether their paperwork will satisfy it.

For an international patient, a centre with an experienced coordinator is often the difference between a case that proceeds and one that stalls at the committee. It is worth asking who the coordinator is, and how long they have done it, with as much care as you ask about the surgeon.

Salih Gülten qualified in medicine at Istanbul University Cerrahpaşa Faculty of Medicine in 1991.

His early posts were in the Turkish public health system: the Sinop Health Group Directorate from 1991 to 1992 and the Uşak Health Group Directorate from 1993 to 1996. From 1996 to 2011 he held a post at the Uludağ University Department of Health, Culture and Sports, and practised occupational medicine privately in Bursa over the same period.

The central part of the record is from 2003 to 2011, when he was organ and tissue transplantation coordinator at Uludağ University Faculty of Medicine — eight years in the coordinating role at a university transplant programme. He joined Acıbadem Healthcare Services in 2011. His profile describes him as having more than thirty years in medicine, which is consistent with qualifying in 1991.

His stated focus is kidney transplantation and the coordination of kidney, organ and tissue transplant processes, together with nephrology, medical ethics and medical law.

His profile names four memberships: the Organ Transplant Coordinators Association (ONKOD), the Medical Ethics and Medical Law Association, the Bursa Medical Chamber and the Turkish Society of Nephrology.

The ethics and medical law membership is worth pausing on, given what he does. Transplant coordination is the point in the process where the ethical and legal questions are actually handled — whether a donation is voluntary, whether a relationship is what it is claimed to be, whether the documentation will satisfy a committee. A coordinator with a declared interest in medical ethics and medical law is qualified in the part of the job that matters most, and that combination is unusual enough to be worth naming.

The Bursa Medical Chamber membership is a registration fact: Turkish physicians register with provincial chambers, and a chamber is one of the few bodies that can confirm a clinician is licensed to practise.

Not published, and therefore not stated: how many transplants the centre he coordinates performs, its outcomes, his registration number, and any language beyond Turkish and English.