Liv Hospital Bahçeşehir, Istanbul

Liv Hospital Bahçeşehir publishes an organ transplantation centre performing kidney, liver and pancreas transplantation, from living and deceased donors, in both adult and paediatric patients.

The breadth is worth noting. Pancreas transplantation is performed by comparatively few units anywhere: it is usually done for type 1 diabetes with kidney failure, often as a simultaneous pancreas-kidney transplant, and it requires a programme willing to maintain the expertise for a small number of cases. A centre that lists pancreas alongside kidney and liver is describing a full solid-organ abdominal programme rather than a kidney service with a liver list attached.

The paediatric side is similarly substantial as described: paediatric intensive care, paediatric nephrology and paediatric gastroenterology. Children are not small adults in transplantation. A paediatric liver transplant requires a graft sized to the child and reconstruction of smaller vessels, and the care afterwards needs paediatric intensivists and paediatric subspecialists rather than adult ones. A hospital that publishes those subspecialties is claiming the surrounding service, not just the operation.

The centre also describes combined organ transplantation for patients needing more than one organ — liver and kidney together, for instance, which is done where liver disease has destroyed kidney function.

The clinician recorded on this platform at this hospital is Asst. Prof. Himmet Bora Uslu, who is a nephrologist rather than a surgeon.

The hospital publishes approximate figures of 5,000 kidney transplants and 1,000 liver transplants.

Those numbers need reading carefully, and this page would be doing you a disservice by repeating them as this hospital's volume.

The same pair of figures — approximately 5,000 kidney and 1,000 liver — appears on the organ transplantation centre page of Medical Park Florya Hospital, a different hospital in a different group. Two unrelated institutions do not independently arrive at the same two round numbers.

The explanation that fits is that this is a surgical team's cumulative career record, which has followed the team between institutions. That is entirely normal in Turkish transplantation, where senior surgeons move between private groups and take their programme with them. It is also how the figure is usually meant: "our team has performed approximately 5,000 kidney transplants", across careers and institutions, over decades.

What it is not is a statement that this hospital has performed 5,000 kidney transplants. A reader comparing centres on that basis would be comparing a career total against another hospital's annual figure, which is not a comparison at all.

So: if volume matters to your decision, and it should, ask this specific question — how many kidney and liver transplants were performed at this hospital, last year. That is a different number from the one on the website, and it is the one that describes the centre you would be treated at.

The hospital states that its services operate at international standards, but names no specific accreditation. That is a meaningful absence on a page that otherwise describes its programme in some detail, and it is worth asking about directly: which accrediting body, and when was it last awarded.

Also not published: graft and patient survival at any interval; waiting times; the split between living and deceased donors; and any per-year figure for any organ.

The questions that follow.

How many kidney, liver and pancreas transplants were performed here last year? At this hospital, in the last twelve months.

Is the hospital accredited, by whom, and when? Then check the accrediting body's own register.

Who performs the paediatric operations, and who provides paediatric intensive care? A published subspecialty and a rostered consultant are different things.

Who assesses the donor, and is that team independent of the recipient's?

Which named surgeon will operate? Ask for a name, in writing.