Assoc. Prof. Tonguç Utku Yılmaz, MD — Transplant Surgeon, Istanbul

Tonguç Utku Yılmaz qualified in medicine at Hacettepe University Faculty of Medicine in Ankara in 2003, and completed general surgery specialty training at Gazi University Faculty of Medicine, also in Ankara, in 2009.

His published employment record names Acıbadem Healthcare Services from 2016. His profile describes him as having more than twenty years in medicine, which is consistent with qualification in 2003.

What his profile does not set out is the period between finishing specialty training in 2009 and joining Acıbadem in 2016 — seven years that are simply absent from the record. We note the gap rather than fill it. It may cover academic posts, another hospital, or a fellowship; his associate professorship was presumably awarded somewhere in it. But nothing published says so, and inferring a career from a title is exactly how a profile becomes fiction.

If that period matters to your assessment — and for a surgeon it reasonably might, because it is when most transplant surgeons do their subspecialty training — ask the hospital directly.

His published areas of practice are kidney transplantation, liver transplantation, robotic surgery, endocrine surgery, the treatment of haemorrhoidal and anorectal disease, pancreatic, liver and biliary tract surgery, and liver cancer surgery.

The robotic surgery entry is the one that distinguishes this list. Robotic and laparoscopic approaches are used in living-donor nephrectomy — the operation performed on a kidney donor — and the donor operation is where minimally invasive technique matters most. A donor is a healthy person who gains nothing medically from the procedure, so a smaller incision, less pain and a faster return to work are not conveniences but part of the ethical case for living donation at all.

His profile does not state that he performs donor nephrectomy robotically, and this page does not claim it. It states that he works in kidney transplantation and in robotic surgery, which is a reasonable thing to ask the centre about directly if you are the donor rather than the recipient.

The rest of the list is the usual breadth of a Turkish general surgeon: transplantation alongside hepatopancreatobiliary and endocrine work.

This is a shorter profile than some on this site, because less is published about him. That is the honest reason, and it is not a judgement about the surgeon — a hospital's decision about how much to publish tells you about the hospital, not about the clinician.

Not published: transplant volumes, in total or last year; graft survival or any outcome figure; professional society memberships, which his profile leaves blank; a medical council registration number; and any language beyond Turkish and English.

Also not published: what he did between 2009 and 2016, as above.

Everything in that list is answerable by the hospital. The questions worth asking are how many kidney transplants he performed last year, what the centre's one-year graft survival is and how it is collected, and — if you are the donor — how the donor operation is performed and what recovery looks like.

A name on a hospital's website is not a commitment that he will perform your operation.