00:00Unfortunately, this is the darker side to this medical district.
00:05You can set up shop there and start delivering a service without having any specific qualifications.
00:09Who can rent a room in Harley Street? Could I go and rent a room in Harley Street?
00:14I'm sure you could.
00:15Harley Street has long been known for its medical excellence.
00:19And so back in October when I was looking for somewhere to get a little bit of lip filler,
00:23it only made sense to start looking at this medical district in Marylebone.
00:27But a quick social media search told me that almost all of the practitioners I was looking at
00:33all seemed to have the same addresses and the same addresses kept popping up time and time again.
00:38Surely not all of these practitioners could be practicing out of the same clinic.
00:42Some digging around led me to find out that these rooms operate as tweakment hotels
00:47where anybody, medical practitioner or not, can rent out a room for as little as £120 an hour.
00:53Even somebody like me with no medical qualifications could rent out a room,
00:57get busy with a needle and charge you as much as a qualified physician.
01:00I get a bit despondent when thinking about the variability of the patient experience
01:04when you consider non-medics performing these procedures.
01:09You have to be a little bit cautious. Is this person just hot desking?
01:14Are they truly a Harley Street practitioner or are they really just renting a room by the hour?
01:20The name itself sort of engenders a certain degree of trust for patients
01:24and ultimately people are being misled and there are other people who are profiting off this
01:30and effectively taking advantage of patients who unfortunately don't know any better.
01:35We find ourselves managing complications from these types of practitioners
01:40who literally do not have a Harley Street presence.
01:44They just want it on their business card, they want it for their Instagram
01:48but they're usually based all over the country and come down for a day a month
01:55calling themselves a Harley Street practitioner.
01:58Now there's nothing wrong with hot desking. Many industries use hot desking to save on rising rents in London
02:04but it becomes a problem when you combine it with the UK's lax regulations on the tweakment industry.
02:10This industry is projected to be worth more than 11 billion by the end of this year
02:14yet anyone can wield a needle. You can administer tweakments from anywhere.
02:18Airbnbs, hotels and even public bathrooms.
02:21So the current situation we have in the UK means that anyone is able to set up an aesthetics clinic
02:27and start administering these treatments with no qualifications.
02:30They don't require any insurance and this causes an alarming number of complications
02:35which I see quite regularly in my aesthetics practice and I have also seen in my past NHS practice as
02:41well.
02:42Credentials which many practitioners obtain online for as little as £1,000 for a two-day course
02:48are also playing a part in misleading patients.
02:51There are a large number of aesthetics training courses that people can do in the UK
02:55and there's also a large amount of variability in how good these courses are.
03:01Some of them are done online, some of them are in person.
03:04There's no standardisation for these courses and there are no rules about what they should be teaching
03:09and how they should be doing it.
03:1124 or 48 hours is not long enough to teach someone how to safely perform injectables.
03:17They seem to think just by being able to administer and wield a syringe makes them competent when unfortunately it's
03:27not.
03:27The government has proposed a licensing scheme but this could take years to even get drafted
03:32and many have argued that it doesn't go far enough to protect patient safety.
03:37For example filler which is classed as a medical device will still be categorised as a low risk procedure
03:43which means anybody could still technically administer it.
03:47As it stands you can buy filler online for as little as £20.
03:50Whilst fillers are classified as medical devices and not drugs they sit at a level of scrutiny and regulation
03:59which is a bar lower than prescription medicines.
04:03This means that accessibility to these medical devices and administration can be done by non-healthcare practitioners
04:13which is absolutely ridiculous because fillers can cause far greater damage to a patient than Botox ever could.
04:24Personally I disagree with the concept of dermal fillers being categorised as a low risk procedure
04:29because the potential risk from fillers include vascular occlusion, they include potential embolisation
04:35so when bits of dermal filler move in the circulation of the face which can ultimately, very rarely but very
04:42significantly at the same time
04:44cause irreversible blindness and so I personally don't believe that anything that can cause that should be classified as low
04:51risk.
04:52I think the key thing to bear in mind is that when you are attending a facility on Harley Street
05:00you're going to have to look beyond the heritage of the street and unfortunately this is the darker side to
05:10this medical district.
05:12Without proper regulations on who can administer these tweakments
05:16cowboy practitioners with no medical backgrounds can continue to unscrupulously practice tweakments
05:22in medical districts like Harley Street hiding behind the postcode.
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