REGULATION OF COSMETIC INDUSTRY (continued...). Advocacy grou | The Australia Project
REGULATION OF COSMETIC INDUSTRY (continued...).
Advocacy group Operation Redress and its cofounder Maddison Johnstone have been a driving force behind the public call for changes.
“One day we got a call from a nurse whistle-blower,” Ms Johnstone said, “It became clear there were significant issues.
We started looking at the social media of doctors.
We were alarmed from the outset. We were seeing essentially live surgeries happening on Tik Tok and Instagram, both of which have such large [percentages] of children watching, and impressionable and vulnerable people,” Ms Johnstone said.
Dr Tonkin said the changes crack down on advertising that downplays risks and exaggerates benefits.
According to figures released by the Cosmetic Physicians College of Australasia (CPCA), Australians spend up to $1 billion on cosmetic procedures annually.
The new guidelines have met with controversy within the medical community; in particular, the new area of endorsement, which has been approved at the 24 February 2023 Health Ministers’ Meeting, which brings together federal, state and territory health Ministers.
In commenting on the changes, President of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS), Dr Sally Langley, said she had concerns with the endorsement process.
Dr Langley, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, is concerned that an accredited qualification for cosmetic surgery would be held to a lesser standard than the qualifications which are currently required to be registered as a specialist surgeon.
“[RACS] does not support the endorsement process,” Dr Langley said, “Our main concern is that surgeons should be doing surgery”.
Dr Langley emphasised that those surgeons need be trained to RACS standards.
“They are virtually always surgeons trained by RACS,” Dr Langley said.
“At least five years, on top of being a hospital doctor and achieving competency, not just medical and surgical skills, but teamwork, collaboration, decision-making, and professionalism etc. We can’t see that a shorter, more limited, training program for the endorsement process can be safe or acceptable for the public”.
Dr Langley also said that, in addition to concerns about professionalism, the prospect of training is not feasible.
“How will [other medical professionals] do the training? What sort of clinics or hospitals will these trainees go to? It’s just unfathomable to me”.
“We at RACS know what a big job Australian Medical Council (AMC) accreditation is. It takes a lot of staff and it’s very expensive. I can’t see an AMC accredited endorsement program being achievable.
We know that cosmetic procedures have become rampant in the United States and countries in Asia... but we’ve really got to try to stop this endangerment of the community,” said Dr Langley.
It has been reported that there are 5 (five) outstanding class action lawsuits in Australia against cosmetic surgeons.
These will amount to 10’s of millions of dollars (if not more), against our collective medical indemnities that will have to be paid.
Another opponent of these changes asks where the cohort-matched, comparative, evidence is to support RACS’ position that RACS Fellows can practise cosmetic surgery to a “higher standard” (whatever that means) than non-FRACS doctors?
They claim there is no such evidence (publicly available).
There is, however, plenty of anecdotal evidence that RACS-trained surgeons do not always practise cosmetic surgery safely. One only need look as far as the death of a Melbourne patient in the early 2000s after a liposuction procedure performed by a FRACS surgeon at the private facility of another FRACS surgeon.
Other critics (among other things) refer us to the large body of actuarial data on cosmetic procedure litigation held by the various medical indemnity organisations, asking, "why have the relevant Government bodies not subpoenaed this data?"
T.A.P MEDIA ANALYSIS DIVISION.
T.A.P.M.A.D
