Health & Medical Malpractice Law

Medical negligence can have lasting consequences for a patient’s health, income and quality of life. Whether the harm arises from a missed diagnosis, a surgical error, a medication mistake or inadequate follow-up care, Turkish law gives injured patients a clear route to compensation. We advise and represent patients — Turkish and foreign alike — pursuing medical malpractice claims in Türkiye, from the first assessment of the file through to judgment and enforcement.

What Counts as Medical Malpractice

Medical malpractice (tıbbi malpraktis) is any act or omission by a healthcare professional that departs from accepted medical standards and causes harm, injury or death. The key distinction Turkish courts draw is between malpractice — a preventable error a competent professional would have avoided — and complication, an unavoidable adverse outcome that can occur even with faultless care. Only the former gives rise to liability, and separating the two is precisely what the expert evidence in your case is meant to resolve.

Malpractice can involve doctors, nurses, technicians, anaesthetists, pharmacists or other providers, and typically arises in:

• Diagnosis — failure to diagnose, misdiagnosis, or a delayed diagnosis that let a treatable condition worsen.
• Treatment and surgery — technical errors, wrong-site or wrong-patient procedures, retained surgical instruments, or unsuitable treatment choices.
• Medication — incorrect prescription, dosage or administration, or failure to check for drug interactions and allergies.
• Post-treatment care — inadequate monitoring, follow-up or aftercare, including failure to recognise and respond to post-operative complications.
• Consent and disclosure — proceeding without valid informed consent, or failing to explain material risks and alternatives before treatment.

The Legal Framework in Türkiye

Turkish law regulates healthcare closely, protecting patient safety and setting the standards against which a provider’s conduct is judged. The framework governs healthcare institutions (licensing and operating standards for hospitals, clinics and medical centres, including personnel, infrastructure and equipment), patient rights (informed consent, confidentiality of medical information and non-discriminatory access to care), healthcare professionals (the qualifications, duties and ethical rules binding doctors, nurses, pharmacists and others), and pharmaceuticals and medical devices (safety, quality and marketing controls for medicines and devices).

Liability may be pursued in different ways depending on who provided the care, and choosing the right route is one of the most consequential early decisions in a case:

• Private hospitals and physicians — claims are generally civil actions grounded in the Turkish Code of Obligations (No. 6098), brought before the civil courts — as a rule the consumer courts. A private hospital is usually liable for the acts of the doctors and staff it employs.
• Public hospitals — care provided by state hospitals and university hospitals is treated as a service of the administration. Claims proceed as full-remedy (tam yargı) administrative actions against the relevant public authority, not against the individual doctor, and they follow a mandatory pre-action application process.
• Criminal liability — serious negligence causing injury or death can additionally give rise to prosecution under the Turkish Penal Code (No. 5237), which can run in parallel with the compensation claim.

Suing the wrong defendant in the wrong forum is one of the most common ways a strong case is lost. A claim against a state hospital filed in the civil courts — or against a private doctor filed as an administrative action — can be dismissed on procedure alone, often after the deadline to refile has passed.

	Private hospital / physician	Public or university hospital
Forum	Civil (consumer) courts	Administrative courts
Legal basis	Turkish Code of Obligations (No. 6098)	Full-remedy (tam yargı) action
Defendant	Hospital and/or physician	The public authority, not the doctor
Pre-action step	None required	Mandatory application to the administration first

Proving a Claim: The Four Elements

To succeed, a claimant must establish four elements:

1. Duty of care — a professional relationship existed, creating a duty of reasonable care once the provider undertook the patient’s treatment.
2. Breach — the provider fell below the standard a reasonably skilled and competent professional would have met in the same circumstances.
3. Causation — the breach directly caused the injury, rather than the underlying illness or an unavoidable complication.
4. Damage — the patient suffered physical, emotional or financial harm.

Why Expert Evidence Decides the Case

Judges are not doctors, so they defer to specialists. Courts rely on court-appointed medical experts, and very often the Council of Forensic Medicine (Adli Tıp Kurumu), to determine whether the standard of care was breached and whether that breach caused the harm. In practice, the expert report is the case: a favourable report almost always wins, and an adverse one almost always loses.

That makes the report something to engage with actively, not passively await. A prepared claimant supplies the expert panel with complete records, a clear chronology and pointed questions, and — where the reasoning is flawed, the panel lacked the right specialism, or a decisive fact was overlooked — formally objects and requests a fresh panel. Many cases are turned around not on new facts but on a better-argued challenge to a superficial first report.

Time Limits — And Why They Bite Early

Malpractice claims are subject to strict limitation periods, and the correct deadline depends on the forum and the defendant. Public-hospital claims in particular must be pursued within short administrative windows, and they begin to run early — often from when you learned of the harm and its cause, not from when treatment ended or your condition finally stabilised.

Do not wait for your injury to “settle” before seeing a lawyer. The clock can already be running while you are still recovering, and a missed deadline ends even the strongest case before its merits are ever heard.

The practical lesson is simple: treat the limitation period as the first issue in your case, not the last. Early advice lets a lawyer confirm the applicable deadline, complete any mandatory pre-action step, and preserve evidence while it is still available.

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Steps to Take If You Suspect Malpractice

If you believe you have been harmed by negligent care, protect both your health and your claim:

• Get proper follow-up treatment from another provider to address the harm — your recovery comes first, and independent records also help document what went wrong.
• Obtain your medical records from the facility where the treatment took place, ideally a complete certified copy. These are the core evidence, and hospitals are obliged to release them to the patient.
• Document your symptoms and their effect on your daily life, work and family in a dated written record, supported by photographs where relevant.
• Preserve everything — discharge papers, prescriptions, imaging, invoices and correspondence — and avoid signing waivers or settlement offers before taking advice.
• Consult a lawyer early to assess the file, identify the correct forum, preserve evidence and file within the limitation period.

One point worth stressing: do not confront the hospital or accept an informal “goodwill” payment before taking advice. Facilities sometimes offer free corrective treatment or a modest sum in exchange for a signed release, and an ill-considered signature can extinguish a claim worth many times more. Let a lawyer review any document before you sign it, and keep all communication with the provider in writing.

Compensation You Can Recover

Where liability is established, compensation may cover:

• Medical expenses — past and future costs, including hospital bills, corrective surgery, medication and rehabilitation.
• Lost income — past and future earnings lost because of the injury, including reduced earning capacity.
• Pain and suffering — moral (non-pecuniary) damages for physical and psychological harm and loss of enjoyment of life; close family members may also claim in cases of death or severe injury.
• Permanent disability or disfigurement — compensation reflecting the lasting effect on the patient’s life, based on the assessed degree of disability.

The amount turns on the severity of the injury, its impact on the patient’s life, the cost of treatment and the long-term consequences, all assessed through expert reports and medical evidence. Because future costs and lost earning capacity are calculated on actuarial principles, thorough medical and financial documentation directly affects the sum recovered.

What This Means for Foreign Patients

Türkiye is a major destination for medical tourism, and foreign patients enjoy the same protections and remedies as Turkish nationals. Turkish courts have jurisdiction over treatment provided in Türkiye, so you can pursue a claim here even after returning home. You do not need to attend every hearing in person: a lawyer can conduct the case under a power of attorney, and documents in other languages can be submitted with certified translations. The same emphasis on records applies with extra force — gather your Turkish discharge summaries, operative notes and invoices before you leave the country, as they can be far harder to obtain from abroad.

How We Help

We assess the merits of your case, gather and preserve medical evidence, instruct and challenge expert reports, and pursue your claim through the correct civil, administrative or criminal channel. Our aim is to have liability and the compensation provided by Turkish law assessed correctly — with the deadlines met, the right defendant named, and the medical case argued on your terms rather than left to a single unexamined report.