Altınbaş University deleted her record in July 2022, the hospital kept her 15 months: Osmaniye State Hospital's doctor with suspect Russian transfer papers

In Türkiye, a student who transfers from a university abroad into a Turkish medical faculty does so under rules set by the Council of Higher Education (YÖK), and the transcripts and enrolment documents in that transfer file are what the receiving university relies on. Those documents are also the weak point: a forged transfer file can carry a student through to graduation and into a state hospital post. A column by Murat Ağırel in Cumhuriyet on 24 January 2026, republished by Medimagazin two days later, set out one such case at Osmaniye State Hospital.

According to Cumhuriyet, a doctor identified only as Sultan D. had transferred laterally into the medical faculty of Altınbaş University on the strength of documents said to come from RUDN University in Russia. Altınbaş deleted her faculty record on 18 July 2022, citing forged documents. Yet, the column reported, she carried on working as a doctor at Osmaniye State Hospital for roughly fifteen months after that deletion.

Cumhuriyet reported that in August 2023 a tip-off alleging fake documents and irregular registrations in transfers from abroad reached the Kızıltepe Chief Public Prosecutor's Office and was forwarded to YÖK, whose Higher Education Inspection Board opened an investigation. On 25 October 2023 the Health Ministry's Inspection Board ordered her removal from duty under the Civil Servants Law, stating, in the ministry letter quoted by the columnist, that there was strong suspicion the RUDN documents did not reflect the truth. Both reports say the wider probe found several other Altınbaş registrants with unacceptable documents, whose records were also deleted, and that criminal complaints were filed in Mardin on 16 August 2024 against two other individuals and separately in Bakırköy over a third who had transferred to another university. Neither report clearly records a prosecution of Sultan D. herself, and neither carries a response from the hospital, the ministry, YÖK or the university beyond the suspension letter.

The failure here was not detection but transmission. The university found the problem in 2022 and acted; she nonetheless kept seeing patients until a prosecutor's tip reached YÖK a year later. The columnist asks whether the hospital was ever notified, why the Health Ministry did not learn of the deletion sooner, how many patients she treated and prescriptions she signed in that gap, and where the audit chain from equivalence recognition through lateral transfer to the ministry broke down. The reports give no answers to those questions.

For students, the practical point is that transfer and equivalence paperwork is checked, sometimes years later, and a bought transcript from a foreign university can unravel a whole career. For patients and families, the lesson is that a hospital badge is not a verification. In Türkiye you can ask for a doctor's diploma number and check registration with the provincial health directorate and the Turkish Medical Association; abroad, use the national regulator's register. Where a document came from a foreign university, the only safe path is official equivalence, not an agent's shortcut.