Aesthetic clinicians demand change to GMC guidance around remote prescribing
Dr Steven Land, director of Novellus Aesthetics, along with some 300 UK aesthetic doctors and nurses, has sent an open letter to Charlie Massey, chief executive of the General Medical Council (GMC), sharing collective concern over the breaking of remote prescribing rules by some clinicians.
The letter follows an undercover investigation by The Sunday Times published on 31 October which revealed doctors and nurse prescribers agreeing to sign off prescriptions for botulinum toxin on behalf of non- medics in exchange for money, without ever seeing or speaking to the would-be patients.
Dr Land told Aesthetic Medicine he felt compelled to write the letter “on behalf of aesthetics doctors, dentists and nurses, insisting [regulatory bodies] act to protect the public from rogue prescribers and protect the reputation of their members.”
An excerpt from the letter reads: “For too long,
aesthetic medicine has been seen as a poor relative
of ‘proper medicine’ and not taken seriously by the regulatory bodies. This has led to the situation we find ourselves in with little to no regulation and the proliferation of poor practice which goes unchecked. The regulatory bodies of medics involved in this highly skilled and rewarding branch of medicine owe it to their members and the general public to try and bring some sort of order to
the chaos.
“...The press report highlighted shines a light on the poor practice of doctors and nurses providing remote prescriptions for non-medics to inject the world’s most dangerous neurotoxin. This practice is already against the guidance produced by the GMC, but this seems to be little deterrent (and we note, this guidance is already very old in terms of the speed of development in aesthetic medicine).
“...We believe that prescribing injectable aesthetic medicines to be given by non-medics should be against guidance completely. The field of aesthetic medicine in this country is awash with non-medics injecting prescription-only medicines and implantable class III medical devices – we are one of the only countries in the civilised world that allows this counterintuitive situation to continue and are the laughing stock of the wider aesthetic medicine community.
“...Of interest, we also note that you are in the process of updating the Good Medical Practice guidance and if you felt that this (fairly simple) change in guidance did require wider consultation then this would seem to be an ideal opportunity to do it. We firmly believe though that this guidance needs issuing now and being acted upon firmly and decisively when necessary, to prevent further patient harm and the damage to our collective reputation.”
Other clinicans to lend their signature to the letter included Dr Raj Thethi, Dr Manav Bawa, Dr Shirin Lakhani and Dr Grant McKeating.
