Thanks to the popularity of surgically enhanced reality TV stars such as the cast of The Only Way is Essex, plastic surgery procedures have become a multimillion pound industry in the UK.
Now the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) has called for tighter regulation of the industry, saying procedures such as Botox and injectable fillers are being carried out on the High Street by practitioners with little or no training.
Currently only doctors can prescribe Botox and the General Medical Council has announced a crackdown on remote prescribing. However, it is not difficult to obtain Botox over the internet and anyone can legally inject it into a patient. For hyaluronic fillers there is even less regulation. At the moment, fillers do not have to be prescribed and can be injected by any person in a High Street beauty salon with ‘little or no’ training.
Sally Taber, director of Treatments You Can Trust, said she would like the Scottish Government to do more to persuade businesses to sign up to the scheme. And she said the goal was to raise awarenessand to encourage the public to ask more questions.
“We want to make sure the public asks the right sort of questions about what sort of training people have had and about what is being injected and how much,” she added.