The BACN response to the DHSC consultation

When Professor Sir Bruce Keogh's Review of the Regulation of Cosmetic Interventions 2013 highlighted concerns about the aesthetics sector, the two authors of BACN's response Constance Campion-Awwad and Emma Davies, set out a comprehensive, evidence-based document on behalf of nurses which made several key points. The strongest statement was that there was an existing framework of standards that nurses and doctors were mandated to deliver in their treatment and care of patients, and there could be no deviation from that standard due to the law. Secondly, it was pointed out that only nurses and doctors can meet the legal standard of patient care, defined in law as ‘the reasonable standard of care’. What had emitted in the wider aesthetics industry however, was that due to the historic fact that incursions by non-registered specialists, had already over-taken specialist accredited plastic surgeons in the sector, this led to the commercialisation of cosmetic surgery as we have never seen before, but under the blind-eye of the Department of Health. The Government had shown no appetite for regulation and neither did the regulator, the General Medical Council, and as a result, commercial cosmetic surgery established itself in its own free market zone. As non-surgical medical aesthetics is far less risky than surgery and it is a lot more lucrative an area of work than aesthetic surgery; a widening selection of practitioners from a vast army of providers, including allied healthcare workers, entered the ‘aesthetics industry’ that took shape and outnumbered the medical sector, including non-medics.