Florence Nightingale

Grup Florence Nightingale is a private hospital group based in Istanbul. By its own account the first hospital opened in 1989 as a 50-bed health centre performing about 250 open-heart operations a year, and grew into a 352-bed reference hospital that has since performed more than 2,000 open-heart operations. Gayrettepe followed in 1997, Kadıköy in 2007, and the purpose-built İstanbul hospital in 2013.

The group also names a teaching link: its corporate material describes Demiroğlu Bilim University (established 2013) as part of the group's structure, alongside a clinical research centre and a GMP facility. The group's chairman and chief executive is Prof. Dr. Cemşid Demiroğlu.

The size of the group is described slightly differently on two of its own pages. The international-patient page says four general hospitals and two medical centres; the chairman's message says four hospitals and three medical centres, one of them in London. Neither page changes what a visitor to Istanbul would use, but it is a reminder to ask for the specific facility rather than rely on a group-wide summary.

A group name can hide the fact that a patient is treated in one building. The four Istanbul campuses are not interchangeable, and by the group's own descriptions they specialise differently. İstanbul (Şişli) is the large, newest building and the one built with international patients in mind. Gayrettepe is the oncology and imaging site. Kadıköy is the cardiac site. Ataşehir is a general hospital with an emphasis on women's and children's health, internal medicine and orthopaedics.

If your reason for travelling is a cardiac procedure, a cancer diagnosis or a transplant evaluation, the useful question is therefore not "is Florence Nightingale good?" but "which campus will treat me, and who is the named consultant there?" Campus-level descriptions are in the list above.

The group runs a Center for International Patients (CIP). It states that, from first enquiry, CIP staff arrange physician review of medical records, contact patients or relatives about next steps, organise transfers within Türkiye, and plan the hospital stay.

The regions the CIP page names are the Middle East and Gulf, North Africa, Central Asia and the Caucasus, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Western Europe is not on that list. That is not evidence that the group cannot treat a patient from the UK or Germany — it is a description of where its international desk has concentrated — but a reader from those countries should ask the CIP directly about language support and post-operative follow-up at home, rather than assume the service has been built around them.

In Türkiye, a facility that treats international patients needs a health-tourism authorisation from the Ministry of Health, and an intermediary that arranges treatment needs a separate one from USHAŞ.^[2][4] Ask which entity you are contracting with, and check its authorisation.

The group's international-patient page lists "Joint Commission International Accreditation Certification" against 2004 and "ISO 9001 Quality Assurance System Certification" against 2001 in its timeline. In the text of the same page it says that the group "continuously pursue[s] accreditation from the Joint Commission International". Those two statements are not the same: one records a certificate in a given year; the other describes an ongoing aim. Neither tells you whether a particular campus holds a current JCI certificate today.

A JCI accreditation either appears in JCI's public register or it does not, which makes it checkable in a way that a badge on a hospital's own website is not.^[1] Türkiye has also set a 31 December 2026 deadline for authorised health-tourism facilities to complete national accreditation with TÜSKA, and that institute publishes the list of organisations it has accredited.^[5] We have not been able to confirm either status for any Florence Nightingale campus, and this page makes no claim that it holds them.

Treat everything above that is attributed to the hospital as a description of what it says about itself, accurate as of the date we read its pages. Treat the accreditation section as a to-do list, not a conclusion. We have no commercial relationship with this group, it has not reviewed this page, and nothing here is a recommendation to choose it or to avoid it.