Providers: how you can make Cosmetic Surgery Safer

With the new range of tools and services we have developed with patients, surgeons and providers you can: 

• help patients make the best decision about their choice of procedure, surgeon and hospital.
• demonstrate the quality of the service and the care you offer.
• assess the quality of your service and make improvements where necessary.

Help make cosmetic surgery safer: 

• Only use surgeons with the right skills and experience to perform cosmetic surgery – we have launched a new certification scheme for surgeons that allows patients and employers to find a certified surgeon on the RCS web site. Before a surgeon has gained certification through our scheme, we strongly recommend that the surgeon is on the GMC’s specialist register in a relevant specialty and that they work within their area of specialty training.
• Make sure that your surgeons have adequate professional indemnity insurance that covers the cosmetic surgical procedures they undertake.
• Take account of the GMC’s Guidance for Doctors who Offer Cosmetic Interventions (2016) and RCS’ Professional standards for cosmetic surgery (2016). Our standards set out the ethics and behaviour we expect of all surgeons who perform cosmetic surgery. They address key areas of risk for cosmetic surgery including communication with patients, consent, professional behaviours, and dealing with the psychologically vulnerable patient. It should be read in conjunction with the GMC guidance.
• Make sure your advertising and marketing is realistic, ethical, honest and responsible and follows regulatory codes and guidelines set by the Committee of Advertising Practice. Refrain from using financial inducements - such as discounts, time-limited or two-for-one offers - that may influence the patient’s decision.
• Tell your patients about our online information resources and take account of our guidance when producing information for patients. If you would like to order hard copies of the downloadable patient resources please contact us for a quote.
• Use our pre-surgery information checklist to audit the delivery of important pre-operative information between the operating surgeon and the patient.
• Comply with the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) requirements about data collection and reporting. Submit information to PHIN and where routine collection is not yet possible, analyse locally through audit.
• Work towards collecting and reporting on the RCS’ data items for every cosmetic surgical procedure, to ensure that appropriate data are collected to support audit and quality improvement.
• Use SNOMED CT and the new cosmetic surgery subsets as the terminology of choice within your electronic health record system. This will ensure clearer and more consistent communication between different parts of the healthcare system. It will also allow for improved ability to extract activity data that accurately reflects practice as SNOMED terms link with the codes within OPCS and ICD10.
• Routinely collect and report on patient feedback. We recommend using the Q-PROMs tools for selected procedures.

Access the tools and services here and read more information about the work we are doing to make cosmetic surgery safer.