Short answer: a domestic scientific meeting organised or supported by a pharmaceutical company in Türkiye must be notified to TİTCK at least fifteen working days before the event, and the window stretches to thirty working days for meetings held abroad. The agency replies electronically within ten working days, and if no reply arrives the application counts as approved. For medical device companies the notification deadline is at least fifteen days. The filing covers the programme, the expected participant list, every cost item and the name of the agency running the organisation, so the agency is a visible part of the file. This is the most rule bound corner of the corporate events business, and not a small market: according to ICCA's GlobeWatch 2025 report, Istanbul climbed to 18th in the world and 13th in Europe with 95 international congresses, while Türkiye ranked 33rd with 142. A large share of those meetings sit in healthcare. Below is what actually drives the calendar, the budget and the run of show for a pharma or medical device event.
How far in advance is a meeting notified to TİTCK?
The application guideline issued under the Regulation on Promotional Activities of Human Medicinal Products sets two deadlines: at least fifteen working days for domestic meetings and at least thirty working days for meetings abroad. Filed notifications are answered electronically within ten working days, and silence counts as approval. The phrase working days matters here. Fifteen working days easily becomes three calendar weeks once a public holiday lands in the middle, so the venue option has to be secured before the filing goes in. On the medical device side, the guideline issued under the Medical Device Sales, Advertising and Promotion Regulation requires electronic notification at least fifteen days ahead, and applications with missing information are rejected by the system if they are not completed within five working days. Since the start of 2024 medical device notifications also carry an application fee, and that fee is not refunded when a meeting is cancelled.
Scientific meeting or product promotion meeting?
The two formats follow different rules, and mixing them up gets the application thrown out. A product promotion meeting is where a licence holder presents its own product to physicians, dentists and pharmacists; it runs as a single day event of no more than four hours. Only the licence holder may organise it. It cannot be run through an association or against a donation, and travel and accommodation for participants other than speakers cannot be covered. Running one for students at faculties that train healthcare professionals is prohibited. For scientific meetings the four hour mark means something else: a meeting of up to four hours can be held as a day event with a single company's support, while domestic meetings longer than four hours and all meetings abroad require support from at least two companies with products related to the topic. No product promotion is allowed at a single sponsor scientific meeting, no stand and no satellite symposium, and the supporting company may only use its corporate logo.
How many company supported meetings can one physician attend per year?
Four. The guideline allows a healthcare professional to benefit from licence holder support four times in the same calendar year. Only two of those four may come from the same company, and only two may be used for meetings abroad. Anyone attending as a speaker or as a researcher presenting a written or oral paper falls outside the count. The medical device guideline mirrors this: four supports a year, at most two from the same sales centre, at most two abroad. Support goes to the organisation running the meeting, never directly to the individual. For an invitation list this quota has a practical edge. The physician you want in November may have had their allowance used up in March by a completely different company, so the list needs to be locked early and built with alternates.
Can a company sponsor the gala dinner or the opening cocktail?
No. The guideline lists the support items available for scientific meetings one by one: general sponsorship, participant registration, accommodation and travel, satellite symposium, stand participation and satellite speaker fees. Then comes a flat sentence: applications filed under names such as session sponsorship, panel sponsorship, opening cocktail, gala dinner or social programme are not evaluated. AİFD's 2026 Code of Good Promotional Practice draws the same line from the industry side, stating that member companies do not take on the sponsorship of congress dinners, opening and closing cocktails or gala dinners, directly or indirectly. No social programme runs while the scientific programme is in session, and inviting a singer or performer simply to draw a crowd is treated as inappropriate. The opening show that would be routine at a dealer meeting is the item that can sink the whole filing here.
Which dates are closed when you build the calendar?
Licence holders cannot organise or support meetings at ski resort destinations between 1 December and 1 March, or at seaside holiday destinations between 15 June and 15 September. So a July congress in Antalya or a January meeting at a ski resort is ruled out by regulation before anyone checks venue availability. The exception is narrow: international meetings documented as being held in a different country each time fall outside the restriction. AİFD's code goes a step further and treats meetings held in Türkiye every year as covered by the same restriction even when they carry an international label. The medical device guideline leaves one small window, allowing educational activities during the closed dates if only healthcare professionals working in that region attend. The net effect is that healthcare congresses crowd into spring and autumn, which is also why venue and hotel inventory sells out early.
Is there a ceiling on sponsorship and catering spend?
Support amounts are pegged to the gross minimum wage. At scientific meetings supported by at least two licence holders, general sponsorship cannot exceed seven times the gross minimum wage, while satellite symposium and stand participation support cannot exceed fifteen times. For single sponsor meetings the general sponsorship ceiling is fifteen times. With the 2026 monthly gross minimum wage set at 33,030 TL, those ceilings work out to 231,210 TL and 495,450 TL. World and continental congresses held in Türkiye are exempt from these caps. Catering is governed by industry rules rather than regulation: AİFD's code, aligned with EFPIA, caps the cost of a meal at 75 euros per person excluding VAT, and the host country limit applies for meetings abroad. Time given to hospitality also cannot exceed the time given to the scientific content.
How do satellite symposia and the rational drug use session shape the programme?
A satellite symposium is the only session type where product promotion is permitted at a scientific meeting, and the guideline puts two limits on it. Total satellite symposium time cannot exceed 25 percent of the total scientific programme, and each individual satellite symposium must run at least 30 minutes. Coffee and meal breaks are excluded from that calculation, so a six hour programme is measured after the breaks come out. The second rule is the rational drug use session. In any calendar year, at least 60 percent of the meetings longer than six hours that companies organise or contribute to must include a session on rational drug use related to the meeting topic, built around training materials and diagnosis and treatment guides approved by the Ministry. Both rules land directly on how much stage time is left for everything else.
What the agency still owes after the meeting ends
Notification is not a one off task. Once the meeting has taken place, the licence holder reports the participant list, the cost items and the activities held to the agency within thirty days at the latest, and keeps copies of all support related documents plus the original signed undertakings from the organisers for five years. On the medical device side the feedback window is one month. Changes travel on paper too: a change of venue, a different hotel for instance, is reported in writing at least three days in advance, and a date change for a product promotion meeting is reported at least five days ahead and can only move the meeting forward. If the date of a scientific meeting changes, the application is cancelled and a new one is filed. If you are planning a congress, a satellite symposium or a product promotion meeting in the healthcare field, the Tales Event team builds the venue, stage, sound, LED screen and simultaneous interpretation setup around this calendar, and settles the agency details that will appear in the filing from day one.
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