Further to Mr Sultan Hassan’s comments made on Sky News Live in March 2016, we at elite surgical welcome the new guidelines published by the GMC around cosmetic surgical intervention which essentially are aimed at improving the quality of treatment delivery and safety for patients considering cosmetic surgical interventions.
Most responsible practices such as Elite Surgical already comply with this set of basic guidelines and in fact go well beyond! Proper patient consent, with written information, mandatory reflection periods before agreeing to perform a procedure, considering a patient’s emotional and psychological well being and not offering marketing ploys to entice patients to book a procedure such as time limited offers, buy one get one free etc These types of guidance are welcomed.
More could be done such as protecting patients from confusion about whether their doctor is indeed a cosmetic surgeon or not. Any doctor can legitimately call themselves a cosmetic surgeon as it is remarkably not a Protected Title. One would expect this to be another name for a fully accredited Plastic Surgeon who is registered on the GMC Specialist Register for Plastic Surgery, but unfortunately it is far from this. GP’s and non surgically accredited doctors in the UK perform cosmetic surgical procedures on patients who often are unaware that their surgeon is actually not on the Plastic surgery specialist register of the GMC.
It is a fact that in this context a domestic animal has more protection in law than patients. If a plastic surgeon were to operate on a dog, this would be illegal whereas if a GP performed breast augmentation on a patient who had given consent then this remains legal!
Nevertheless, we welcome this as a step in the right direction.
New GMC Surgical and Non-Surgical Cosmetic Standards
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