Health Secretary Wes Streeting has vowed to crack down on the “Wild West” of botched cosmetic surgery which is putting “lives at risk” in the UK.
Dodgy ‘beauty’ firms have been carrying out “high risk” procedures, such as liposuction and liquid BBLs (Brazilian bum lifts), in High Streets up and down the country.
These potentially deadly procedures are being carried out by people who have had just hours of training, an ITVX documentary team revealed. They went undercover and exposed the “beyond belief” basic training being offered to wannabe ‘aesthetic practitioners’.
Since 2021 in the UK there have been almost 1,193 ambulance callouts to businesses with beauty or aesthetics in the name, their freedom of information request revealed. These NHS teams were alerted for reasons such as chest pain, immediate threats to life and major trauma.
And in the last five years there have been more than 670 complaints to local authorities about aesthetic procedures. An increasing number of “cosmetic tourists” have been travelling abroad for surgery prompting safety concerns in recent years.
But experts are warning there are huge problems right on our doorstep too. Beauticians operating in salons, shops and even people’s homes, are paying £1,500 for a few hours training in the UK, before sticking a large piece of metal into a patient’s neck during so-called ‘non-invasive fat reducing’ procedures.
Experts and grieving families are calling for urgent action, saying there is a risk of deadly sepsis and other infections. While Health Secretary, Wes Streeting described it as; “absolutely disgusting that there are Wild West operators…putting people’s lives at risk.”
In September, mum-of-five, Alice Webb, aged 33, became the first to die following a liquid BBL procedure in a UK clinic. Her partner Dane Knight from Gloucestershire, has joined experts in calling for change.
He wants to see ‘Alice’s law’ introduced to stop non medics being able to perform these procedures. “I think more could be done, the process could be speeded up more. It is yet to be seen if they are taking it seriously enough,” he told ITV.
“By putting this Alice’s law in place, it will prevent this from happening to any other family and destroying other lives.” About their trauma, he said: “The worst bit was obviously coming back from the hospital and then reciting in my head how do I tell the kids.
“Telling them was one of the worst things I have ever had to do. The way I worded it was ‘mum went’ for a procedure she fell asleep and hasn’t woken up. “They are told that mum is above, mum is watching above you. It is okay to talk to mum in your head, out loud, I do.
“She was a great mum, a great partner and she was one of a kind, she was unique in her own way, special in her own way.”
Two people have been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter in connection with her death and released on bail.
Ashton Collins, director of Save Face, says she is “angry” about the training filmed by ITV and warned: “This is going on all over the country, every day and more and more people are having these treatments done and these so-called training academies are capitalising on this and they are unsafe.”
Last year Save Face launched a campaign calling for a ban on high-risk liquid BBL procedures saying they were a “crisis waiting to happen”. The UK has some of the most lenient laws in the western world with doctors carrying out such cosmetic surgery having to operate under strict regulations where beauticians don’t.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting told the programme they were “working as fast as we can” to crack down on dodgy operators in the cosmetic surgery world. He told ITV: “I think it is absolutely disgusting that there are Wild West operators practising - actually dangerously - in cosmetic surgery and putting people’s lives at risk and we’ve seen that in the tragic case of Alice.
“That is why, to be fair to them, the previous Government initiated work on this and we are carrying it through. We are working as fast as we can. We know that we need to act, we are taking this seriously and we are going as fast as we can."
But he said at this stage there was no exact timeframe. ITV filmed two training courses carried out by two different clinics in London; one for Liquid BBL and another for ‘fat reduction procedures,’ otherwise known as liposuction.
In the film, a female trainer, who is not a registered doctor, talked about how they’d only damaged a few nerves and severed one artery during their fat reduction ‘liposuction’ procedure in the neck. The students went through half an hour theory before the patient arrives and the instructor puts the ‘wand’ into the patient’s neck before allowing a trainee to have a go.
‘It looks quite scary… but it’s not, no pain, everything is fine,” the ‘aesthetic practitioner’ tells the students before the patient, asked about if there’s pain, says “a little bit’. The patient is only under a local anaesthetic, so is awake throughout as the rod is put ‘quite deep’ into their neck..
After this the shocked undercover reporter had “seen enough” and made her excuses - claiming her son had fallen and hit her head and left the clinic. She was told; “Don’t worry. I will give you a certificate okay,” despite not finishing the basic training.
Professor Iain Whitaker, leading plastic surgeon with decades of experience, told ITV: “How she can be allowed to do this with zero training or medical healthcare background is just beyond belief.”
“It actually disgusts me to be honest,’ he told ITV. “I’ve been a doctor for over 22 years now. I never thought in my lifetime I would see something like that, an invasive surgical procedure, carried out by essentially a beautician. I just think we really need to take a hard look at the regulations.”
Later showing how the surgery should be performed , he said: “It’s very high risk in the wrong hands”. He points out there is a risk of infection when you make a hole in the body, so it is important there is a sterile area.
“How can anyone say this is non-invasive? Sticking a large piece of metal into someone’s body with the potential risks associated!”.
A former patient, called Keylea Griffiths, told ITV she had ‘lipolysis’, sold to her as a non-invasive fat dissolving treatment, at the same salon that had offered the training.
“The next I recall was the burning hot probe that was inserted, I squealed out and as I squealed out I looked to the other side of me and up on their cupboards was someone else’s blood splashed.”
She ended up in hospital with suspected bladder damage but later recovered.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We are extremely concerned by reports of highly invasive cosmetic procedures being performed by inadequately trained practitioners.
“The safety of patients is paramount, and we would urge anyone considering cosmetic surgery to consider the possible health impacts and find a reputable, insured and qualified surgeon.
“All doctors performing cosmetic surgery in the UK must be registered with and licensed to practise by the General Medical Council (GMC).
“We are exploring options around regulation of the cosmetics sector and will provide an update in due course.”
Britain’s Backstreet Surgery Scandal is available to watch on ITV X from Thursday, November 14th.