Aarti: People have asked me – what is the big deal about regulation. I will discuss this in this video, because it is quite important. This is why there is a difference between whether you go and have it done in a salon by a beauty therapist, who is trained to do these treatments.
You don’t know the difference until things go wrong, because when something happens, and the person who treated you is regulated by somebody higher up; so if it’s a nurse was regulated by the nursing register, or a midwife, or a doctor was regulated by the General Medical Council; the regulators will totally come at us with pitchforks and torches if we harm a patient.
Our pin numbers are very important to us, so we will do anything to protect our patient.
Believe me there are no clients in these treatments. When a doctor sees a patient, the person is a patient! I would treat them as a patient. I am a GP, and I would not offer private services to a patient who is an NHS patient under my care.
Now that is part of the GMC ethics. There are new regulations for cosmetic treatment from the GMC; it is regulated believe it or not.
Tthere are so many things we have to do, like any other medical treatment and we have to remain on that register. And that is the standard of care you get from a doctor, who’s trained to do this, and who is actually proven that they are doing this to a high standard over a period of time. Not someone who has taken two days of training! The GMC discourages doctors from carrying out independent treatment unless they have logged ten accounts of that treatment, supervised by someone who’s experienced in it. This is just the same as doing a hernia operation. We used to get it signed off during hospital training.
Similarly, we have to get these procedures signed off now before we do them. So none of your 48-hour trainings and doing it.
So having said that, then there’s medical insurance. Insurers insist that we act within our own competence, which means don’t do anything that the insurer hasn’t checked out, and confirmed that you can do it. However, insurance cannot replace regulation, simply because insurance kicks in only after the fact. Regulation on the other hand, aims to foster a mindset of keeping patients safe from harm. So no testing things on patients. No trying out something saying “oh the patient wants it, let’s do it, because they’re paying for it”. If the patient demands an unsuitable treatment saying “I’m paying for it, you got to do it” I will strictly tell them No.
