Call me old fashioned, but winning surgery as a prize in a competition strikes me as bizarre. Since when could a medical procedure – and one with potential complications at that – masquerade as a prize? Since when could surgery be won?
Well, since the cosmetic surgery industry rolled into action. Really, since cosmetic procedures became commercialized.
With commercialization came lower standards, wild claims, dodgy techniques, dodgier practitioners and an erosion of the checks and balances that keep orthodox medicine on the straight and narrow.
Thank heavens, then, for new legislation. Under Government plans to clamp down on rogue cosmetic surgery firms, women can no longer be offered breast implants as competition prizes or special offers.
To prevent non-specialists carrying out cosmetic operations, surgeons will, for the first time, be required to have standardized training and qualifications.
Medical regulators have drawn up strict rules in response to the recent breast implant scandal in which an estimated 47,000 British women were given substandard implants made by the French firm PIP.
The inquiry launched afterwards uncovered widespread abuses in the industry, estimated to be worth £2.3billion a year, which has been getting away with poor practices that would be condemned as unethical in other areas of surgery. These include cut-price deals that don’t allow patients to be refunded if they change their mind, and mother-and-daughter offers – two operations for the price of one.
The reforms will be jointly supervised by the Royal College of Surgeons and the General Medical Council. The first specialized qualifications in cosmetic surgery will come into force with regular skills and ethics checks for surgeons to remain registered.
The tightening-up will mean that surgeons from abroad who seek registration will have to demonstrate competence in cosmetic surgery and in speaking English.
At present, European doctors can register without special checks in Britain, so high street providers have brought in inexperienced, low-cost foreign surgeons.
Simon Whitey, a plastic surgery consultant at the Royal Free Hospital in north London, said: “There should be no such thing as the cheap option; you should get a certain standard of care, you should get excellence.
“If you can raise the bar here, you can challenge everyone coming into this country, and say: ‘Show us you can jump over that bar’.”
All types of breast implants will have to be registered and there will be a reporting center for problems with breast implants, so that early warnings can be sent to clinics as soon as there is an alert.
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