A top surgeon has spoken out about the number of people relying on the NHS to fix botched surgery abroad.
A top UK surgeon has spoken about pressure on the NHS from Brits needing help to fix botched surgery abroad.
One case study featured a 15-year-old girl who’d snuck off to Turkey for breast enhancements behind her parents’ backs.
Speaking with the MailOnline, Dr Marc Pacifico, president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, said: ‘I was told by one colleague about a patient requesting amendments to their breast augmentation, a boob lift, that didn’t go as planned.
‘Now that doesn’t sound out of the ordinary, but when I tell you that the patient was 15-years-old and had gone out to Turkey without their parents knowing, now that is just shocking.’
Dr Pacifico’s comments came as he expressed wider concern over the strain on public services placed by people going abroad for aesthetic procedures that wind up not going according to plan.
He said: ‘Every time I speak to colleagues they have at least one patient on their wards with complications from surgery overseas.’
The issue has apparently gotten ‘massively’ worse in recent years, amid the global boom in medical tourism.
Dr Pacifico believes those travelling to Turkey for plastic surgery have been treating the NHS as a ‘safety net’ and have wound up ‘unfairly blocking beds’ that might otherwise have gone to people who didn’t elect for these procedures.
He said: ‘Because of the fact it is so much cheaper to go abroad people are willing to play Russian roulette and take that chance.
‘That’s combined with the mindset that “it won’t happen to me, I’ll be alright” and unfortunately it does happen to some people and they are not alright.
‘It’s a psychological insurance policy, a lot of people are going out having the NHS as a safety net in case things go wrong.’
He added: ‘I have heard many worrying and disturbing stories about how patients are being looked after in a way that is not acceptable.
‘I had one patient who lost half of each breast, which I had to reconstruct, following a breast augmentation procedure.
‘Another had to repeatedly come back to have drainage of fluid build up from areas of liposuction that had been so aggressively drained that they also got burns and damage.
‘It’s a false economy, because while the surgery is cheaper it ends up being a massive cost to them and to their health.’
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