Cosmetic surgery being conducted in ‘living rooms and Airbnbs’, MPs hear

Brazilian butt lifts (BBLs) are being carried out in people’s living rooms, in Airbnbs and in hotel rooms and complications linked to cosmetic surgery have become a “significant burden” on the NHS, MPs have heard.

Ashton Collins, director of Save Face, a register of accredited practitioners for cosmetic surgery, told the Women and Equalities Committee there is a “crisis waiting to happen” because of “grey areas” in regulation.

She called for legislation to ensure that such BBLs are conducted only by qualified surgeons – also known as Alice’s Law, named after a young mother who died after a BBL.

It comes as leading nurses raised concerns that surgical procedures abroad are too easily being sold as “holiday packages”, as they called for companies providing the operations to foot the NHS bill when things go wrong.

So-called surgical tourism could also be driving a potentially deadly resistance to antibiotics, the Royal College of Nursing’s annual congress in Liverpool heard.

In Westminster, the committee also heard from a woman who nearly died after getting a BBL.

Sasha Dean gave tearful testimony describing how she was admitted to intensive care with sepsis and kept in hospital for five weeks.

“The impact is profound,” she said as she told MPs how she was “lulled into a sense of security” and she was “misinformed”.

“These are being carried out by any anybody, they don’t need any qualifications,” she told MPs.

Ms Collins said: “These are surgical procedures that should not be being carried out on the high street – they are being carried out in people’s living rooms, in Airbnbs, in hotel rooms, by people who are using products that they’re buying unlicensed from places like China and Korea.

“They are decanting them from huge vats into individual syringes and inject thousands of millilitres into people’s breasts and buttocks.

“And then when things go wrong, they are misdiagnosing these problems and telling them there’s nothing to worry about, and luckily, all of these women have taken themselves off to hospital, because if they hadn’t, there would have been countless deaths in the UK because of this, and it shouldn’t be allowed to happen.”

And Ms Collins said social media is a “hotbed for unscrupulous practitioners” promoting cosmetic surgery, with young people “being mis-sold on an enormous scale”.

Meanwhile, Professor Vivien Lees, consultant plastic surgeon and vice president at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, said the current regulations surrounding such procedures are “insufficient”.

Prof Lees said: “The global market cosmetic surgery is going to grow threefold, it’s estimated, within the decade.

“So we’re going to see a lot more problems in terms of absolute numbers. We need to set up a structure that will adequately support legitimate work.”

Ms Collins added: “If what happened to all these other women happened in any other context these perpetrators would be behind bars. Out of all of the women we are supporting, we urge all of them to go to the police and make formal reports, and not one of these cases, outside of Alice Webb who lost her life, has been taken seriously by police departments.

“And women are constantly being perceived as silly individuals that are making decisions through vanity, and therefore their complaints are not being taken seriously enough by regulators, and they’re being failed.”

On the impact on the NHS, Prof Lees said: “We regularly (see) people both from this country and from overseas who’ve got acute problems that cannot be sorted out by the people who originally did the treatments.

“In the case of practitioners here, because they don’t have the skillset to sort them, and in the case of overseas tourism, because the patient’s too poorly or has otherwise lost confidence in the facility that treated them, so aren’t going to go back again, and it will probably be unsafe for them to travel in any case.”

She added: “So I’ve seen things like a young woman with infected filler injection in the lips having to have chunks of her lip cut out … we can imagine what that will be like for her over a lifetime.

“I’ve seen infected buttock implants coming out, abscesses, bleeding problems in the middle of the night from clinics, actually medical clinics here that don’t have the ability to treat their own complications.

“So that lands up with the NHS, and it’s turning into a significant burden of work, particularly for the plastic surgeons, also for the breast surgeons on their service and clearly that’s something that needs to be thought about.”

It comes as nurses at the RCN annual meeting heard the trend of people travelling overseas for the likes of weight loss surgery, dental care and cosmetic procedures is “likely to grow”, despite some patients dying from complications.

Nicola Smith, who works in district nursing, told delegates: “Over the last two years, I’ve seen some horrendous, horrendous wounds coming back from people that have had surgery abroad.”

She spoke of one woman whose wound from skin removal surgery – which is usually performed after weight loss – turned necrotic.

Ms Smith added: “I think she thought she would come home, have a quick recovery and go back to work. I ended up sending her in with sepsis.

“It’s really sad, this procedure was sold to her as like a holiday package.

“A lot of young people are very exposed to social media. You know, ‘you can have a holiday, six grand’.”

Professor Sir Stephen Powis, NHS England’s national medical director, said: “I would urge people looking to have surgical treatments abroad or privately to carefully consider not only the safety standards of the clinic, but the aftercare provided, as these procedures can go wrong even if the right standards are in place.

“The NHS is far too often left to provide support for issues with surgical and cosmetic procedures carried out abroad. This puts unplanned pressure on teams who are working hard to deliver essential care for patients within the NHS.”

Infection control nurse Nykoma Hamilton, of the RCN Fife branch, suggested companies that provide packages which include hotels, surgery and transfers to appointments should pay insurance for the NHS to seek financial compensation when complications arise.

“We’ve seen some horrid complications – the NHS should then be able to seek financial compensation from that company,” she said.

She also raised concerns about antibiotic resistance linked to surgical tourism.

“Our concerns relate to the fact that a lot of people are colonised with a lot of extensively drug-resistant organisms,” Ms Hamilton said.

“Now that is a global health problem that affects us here in the UK, as well as abroad, but the infection control teams are getting slightly worried.

“So we’ve had a near 30% increase in the detection of carbapenemase resistance – now that’s your absolute granddaddy of resistance ones.”