Acıbadem Atakent Hospital, Istanbul

The first thing to be clear about is that "Acıbadem" is not a hospital. It is a healthcare group operating a network of hospitals across Türkiye, and its international material compares eight of them.

This matters practically rather than pedantically. A group-level page can describe transplant programmes, JCI accreditation and surgical teams without those things belonging to the same building. A patient who agrees to treatment at "Acıbadem" has not yet established where the operation happens, who performs it, or which site's accreditation and intensive care capacity apply to them.

The group publishes the following for its Istanbul sites: Maslak 231 beds and 20 operating rooms; Ataşehir 298 beds and 10 operating rooms; Altunizade 350 beds and 18 operating rooms; Fulya 101 beds and 8 operating rooms; and Atakent 262 beds and 12 operating rooms. It also operates Acıbadem Kent in Izmir and Acıbadem Adana Orthopedia, and it publishes seven JCI-accredited hospitals within the network.

Atakent is the site that hosts the transplant clinicians most relevant to this platform. Three of the five Acıbadem surgeons recorded here — Hamdi Karakayalı, Tonguç Utku Yılmaz and Ali Özer — publish Atakent as their base. The other two are at Acıbadem Bursa, which is a different city.

Before committing to anything, get the hospital name in writing, not the group name.

Atakent houses both a kidney transplant centre and a liver transplant centre, which is how the group organises transplantation: as named centres within a hospital rather than as a single transplant department.

The group's material describes living-donor liver and kidney transplant programmes, and refers to paediatric liver transplantation among its patient stories. Paediatric liver transplantation is worth noting because it is performed by a minority of units and is technically more demanding than the adult operation — the vessels are smaller and the graft must be sized to a child.

The surgeons based here and recorded on this platform are Prof. Hamdi Karakayalı and Assoc. Prof. Tonguç Utku Yılmaz at the kidney transplant centre, and Assoc. Prof. Ali Özer at the liver transplant centre. Their individual records are unusually complete — Karakayalı's in particular names six professional societies and two Ministry of Health advisory roles.

One thing the group states in general terms is that Türkiye runs some of the world's highest-volume living-donor liver and kidney transplant programmes. That is a statement about the country, not about this hospital, and it should not be read as one. No figure for this hospital's own volume is published anywhere we could find.

Atakent is published as JCI-accredited, and the group states seven JCI-accredited hospitals across its network.

Joint Commission International is the international arm of the body that accredits American hospitals, and it is the most widely recognised hospital accreditation in medical travel. Its standards cover patient safety, infection control, medication management, clinical governance and the handling of patient records.

What it establishes is that an organisation has systems and follows them. It is a genuine and demanding assessment, and it is not a statement about the results of any particular surgical programme. A JCI-accredited hospital can still be the wrong centre for a specific operation, and accreditation is not a substitute for asking a transplant unit for its own outcomes.

JCI accreditation runs on a three-year cycle and must be renewed. JCI publishes its own directory of accredited organisations, and that directory — rather than a hospital's website — is where to confirm a hospital's current status and the date it was last awarded.

Neither this hospital nor the group publishes transplant volume, graft or patient survival, waiting times, or the split between living and deceased donors. Those four figures are what actually separate transplant centres, and their absence is the norm in this market rather than a mark against this one.

So the questions are these, and they are worth putting in writing.

How many kidney and liver transplants did Atakent perform last year? Ask for this hospital and for last year — not a group total, and not a cumulative career figure for a surgeon.

What is your one-year graft survival, and how is it collected? A centre that audits itself answers this without preparation.

Which named surgeon will operate, and at which hospital? Both halves matter in a group this size.

Who assesses the donor, and are they independent of the recipient's team? Donor safety depends on that independence.

What happens if the donor is declined, or the ethics committee refuses? Settle the refund position before paying anything.