Medical Malpractice Law in Türkiye

Medical malpractice claims in Türkiye sit at the intersection of civil, administrative and criminal law. A poor outcome is not enough on its own: a claim succeeds only where a healthcare provider fell below the recognised standard of care and that failure caused harm. This guide sets out what counts as malpractice, the basis of liability, the burden of proof, the mandatory mediation step that applies before suing private providers in the consumer courts, the limitation periods, the compensation available, and what all of this means in practice — including for foreign patients treated in Türkiye.

What counts as malpractice

Malpractice (medical negligence) means a failure to provide the expected standard of care, whether through negligence, lack of knowledge or, rarely, intentional misconduct. Typical examples include:

• Misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis
• Surgical errors, including retained instruments or materials
• Medication and prescription errors
• Failure to obtain valid informed consent
• Post-operative and follow-up failures
• Hospital-acquired infections traceable to a breakdown in basic protocols

A recognised complication that occurs despite correct treatment is generally not malpractice. Every invasive procedure carries a known band of risk, and a bad result inside that band — a documented, foreseeable complication managed properly — will not found a claim. The dividing line between an accepted complication and negligence is the core factual question in almost every case, and it is decided on expert evidence, not on how upset the patient understandably is with the result.

A bad outcome is not the test. The test is whether a competent practitioner, in the same circumstances, would have acted differently — and whether that difference caused your harm.

Basis of liability

The legal route depends on where the treatment took place, and this single fact shapes everything that follows — the forum, the deadline, and who you actually sue.

• Private hospitals and physicians are liable on a contractual basis. The relationship is treated as a contract for medical services, and the provider owes a duty of care and a duty to inform under the Turkish Code of Obligations (No. 6098). Because the source of the duty is a contract, the claimant benefits from a longer limitation period and a lower threshold to establish the relationship.
• Public hospitals are liable under administrative law for service fault (hizmet kusuru). The claim targets the administration as an institution, not the individual doctor, and it proceeds through a preliminary administrative application before any court action.

This distinction drives the correct forum. Claims against private providers go to the consumer courts; claims against public institutions go to the administrative courts. Choosing the wrong court is not a harmless mistake: it can cost you months and, if a deadline passes in the meantime, the claim itself.

Where you were treated	Legal basis	Forum	Correct defendant
Private hospital / clinic	Contract (Code of Obligations No. 6098)	Consumer court	Hospital and/or physician
Public hospital	Administrative service fault (hizmet kusuru)	Administrative court	The public administration
No contractual relationship	Tort	Civil courts	The person(s) at fault

You cannot sue a public doctor personally

A physician acting as a public official cannot be sued personally for acts performed in that capacity. The claim must be directed at the relevant public administration, which may afterwards seek internal recourse against the doctor. Naming the doctor directly in these cases leads to dismissal. This surprises many patients — the natural instinct is to sue “the surgeon” — but in the public system the correct defendant is the institution behind them.

Burden of proof

The patient bears the burden of proving three things:

1. The harm suffered
2. A breach of the standard of care
3. A causal link between the breach and the harm

In practice, the case is resolved on expert reports, usually from the Council of Forensic Medicine (Adli Tıp Kurumu) or court-appointed specialists in the relevant field. These reports are the centre of gravity of the whole case; the judge is not a doctor and will lean heavily on them. That is why the quality of the documentary record matters so much before a single expert is appointed.

The provider, for its part, must show that it met the recognised standard of care and complied with the duty to inform the patient. Weak or missing medical records frequently work against the provider, and a failure to document informed consent is often decisive. In effect, poor record-keeping shifts the practical balance toward the patient — a hospital that cannot show what it did, when, and on what basis will struggle to prove it acted correctly.

Why informed consent is so often the pivot

Consent is not a signature; it is a process. The patient must have understood the diagnosis, the proposed treatment, its material risks, and the realistic alternatives — including doing nothing. A generic form pushed across a desk minutes before anaesthesia, in a language the patient does not read, is fragile evidence. Where the procedure was technically flawless but the patient was never properly informed of a risk that then materialised, the failure to inform can be a standalone breach. For foreign patients in particular, the absence of an explanation in an understood language is a recurring weak point in the provider’s defence.

---

Mandatory mediation before suing — and what the Professional Liability Board actually does

Two mechanisms introduced in recent years are often confused, and mixing them up is costly:

• Mandatory mediation (the actual pre-condition to suit). For compensation claims against private hospitals and physicians brought in the consumer courts, applying to mandatory mediation under Article 73/A of the Consumer Protection Law (No. 6502) is a procedural pre-condition to litigation, not an optional route. Filing suit without completing this step results in procedural rejection without any examination of the merits — the court will not even reach the question of whether malpractice occurred.
• The Professional Liability Board (Law No. 7406). The board established by Law No. 7406 (Supplementary Article 18 of Law No. 3359) is not a body patients apply to, and applying to it is not a condition of a compensation claim. Its role concerns public-sector healthcare personnel: it grants permission for criminal investigations against them, and it decides whether the administration may seek recourse against the professional after paying compensation to the patient.
• The mediation requirement is specific to the consumer-court track; the administrative track against public institutions follows its own separate rules, including the preliminary application to the administration.

Skipping mandatory mediation is not a technicality the consumer court will overlook. A strong case on the facts can be thrown out at the door for missing this single procedural step — check it before you rely on any deadline.

Because these rules are strictly applied, confirm the current procedure and any interaction with your limitation deadline before acting.

Limitation periods

Time limits vary by forum and by the nature of the claim, and they do not all start on the same day:

• Contract-based claims (private hospitals): generally up to ten years. One nuance: where the claim is directed at the physician personally, the relationship is characterised as a mandate (vekâlet), and a five-year period applies under Article 147/5 of the Code of Obligations — the ten-year period applies to the hospital-admission contract with the institution.
• Tort claims: two years from the date you learned of both the harm and the liable party, and ten years at the outer limit from the act.
• Public hospitals (administrative track): a claim is generally made within one year of learning of the act and within five years of the incident; if the administration rejects the claim, a full-remedy action must be filed within sixty days of that rejection.

Where the same facts also amount to a criminal offence — for example gross negligence causing death — longer criminal limitation periods can apply to the civil claim. Because the periods overlap and interact, and because the mandatory mediation step consumes time of its own, the safe course is to obtain advice early rather than assume the longest window applies. The two-year tort clock in particular can run out faster than patients expect while they are still recovering or seeking answers.

Compensation

A successful claim can recover:

• Pecuniary damages — medical and treatment costs, the cost of future care, lost earnings, and loss of future earning capacity where a lasting disability results.
• Non-pecuniary damages — compensation for pain and suffering, calculated by the court on the severity of the harm and its effect on the claimant’s life.
• Loss of support — in fatal cases, dependants (typically a spouse and children) can claim for the financial support they have lost.

The court sets the amount on the evidence, guided by expert reports on both fault and the extent of the damage. There is no fixed tariff; awards are individualised, which makes the medical and financial evidence you assemble — proof of income, care needs and prognosis — directly determinative of what you recover.

What this means for you

Medical malpractice litigation in Türkiye is evidence-intensive and procedurally strict, and small early mistakes are expensive. In practical terms:

• Identify the correct forum first — consumer court for private providers, administrative court for public institutions. This decision cascades through every deadline that follows.
• Preserve everything, immediately. Request your full medical file, imaging, operative notes and the signed consent form as early as possible. These documents decide most cases, and they are far harder to obtain once a dispute becomes adversarial.
• For consumer-court claims against a private hospital or physician, complete the mandatory mediation step before filing. Do not treat it as a formality.
• Watch the limitation clock — the applicable period depends on whether your claim is contractual, tortious or administrative, and the shortest of these can expire quickly.
• If you are a foreign patient, act through local counsel early to secure the Turkish-language file, arrange certified translations and preserve your position while the case proceeds before the Turkish courts.

A practical note for medical-tourism patients: if you travelled to Türkiye for a procedure — cosmetic surgery, dental work, hair transplantation — and returned home before problems emerged, the claim is still brought in Türkiye under Turkish law. Distance is manageable: you can grant a power of attorney to Turkish counsel through a notary or consulate in your own country, and the case can proceed without your repeated presence. What distance does not fix is evidence — have your treating doctor at home document the condition thoroughly and in detail, because that record will need to be translated and put before Turkish court experts.

Early legal advice protects your position on both the deadline and the proof you will need to succeed. In this field, the cases that fail rarely fail because the medicine was defensible — they fail because the deadline slipped, the wrong court was chosen, or the records were never secured.