The injection of dermal fillers in the UK should be regulated, says Caroline Mills
22 October 2018 (Last updated: 4 May 2020 13:18)
Caroline Mills, British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (BAOMS) Lead on Aesthetic/Cosmetic Surgery and Consultant Maxillofacial Surgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital, called for regulation in the UK of therapists who inject dermal fillers in line with European Union (EU) rules.
“In the EU you have to have a medical licence to inject fillers, but no one in the UK government is saying we need similar regulation,” she commented at the recent Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) Beauty Conference.
She told the audience of environmental health officers (EHOs) that there are 200 types of fillers on the market “and it’s the semi-permanent ones that are the problem. Facial surgeons only use temporary, biodegradable fillers”.
The oral and maxillofacial surgeon went on to explain that there are serious medical complications that can result from invasive procedures such as injecting dermal fillers.
“Beauty therapists should not be doing this (injecting fillers) because they cannot recognise the problems.” She described how the fillers can cause vascular occlusion, which can result in blindness “because the condition is irreversible if not dealt with immediately”.
Pointing to the scope of training in the high street beauty salon industry, she asked: “How many beauty therapists could treat a cardiac arrest?”
There is a cost impact to the NHS, she said, but it was unknown how big a problem it is because “there is no NHS coding for non-surgical treatment problems where the client has to go to A&E. So, we don’t know how much it costs the NHS” (in corrective surgery).
She used an example of a patient who had taken up the offer of inexpensive dermal fillers that were being promoted at her gym. The treatment went badly wrong and her patient has now had 30 facial operations, and “her life is ruined”. “There are also both training and hygiene issues too,” Caroline Mills said.
The CIEH professional practice event for EHOs, whose role is to safeguard public health, covered a range of issues that affect the high street beauty industry from: regulation; training; treatments and techniques; future regulation by the Medical Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA); and the experience of introducing new licensing legislation in Wales.
EHOs at the event raised the issue of how they could assess the skills of therapists without right-of-entry to salons without evidence of concern. The experience of EHOs in the West Midlands exposed how few practitioners understood and practiced good infection control. An audit found that an estimated 70% of therapists used re-usable tools.
Something that has led the local authorities to promote single-use tools, and change how notifiable infections caused by a cosmetic treatment such as Hepatitis B will be reported to public health in future.
As Caroline Mills said at the launch of the Joint Council for Cosmetic Practitioners (JCCP) register of practitioners qualified to undertake aesthetic treatments: “The register is a good first step in the potential regulation of non-surgical cosmetic interventions.”
Ends
For further information contact the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH)
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