How to Check the Person Treating You, in About Two Minutes

Most people spend longer choosing a restaurant than checking the person who is about to put a needle into their face. This is not carelessness. It is a reasonable assumption that somebody must have checked already, and in England, for most non-surgical treatment, nobody has.

What the law actually requires

There is no licence to perform most non-surgical cosmetic procedures in England. Dermal filler is regulated as a medical device rather than a medicine, and there is currently no legal barrier to a person with no clinical training injecting it. Premises largely do not need registration for it either.

The government has consulted on a licensing scheme for exactly this reason, and one may eventually arrive. It has not arrived yet, and you are booking now.

There is one meaningful exception. Prescription-only medicines, which includes the muscle-relaxing injections used for lines, must be prescribed by a registered prescriber following a face-to-face assessment of you specifically. A remote prescription written by someone who never saw you, for a treatment administered by someone else, falls short of that standard. It happens routinely.

The four registers

Which one applies depends on the person’s profession, so the first question to ask is not are you qualified but what are you, and where do you appear.

GMC, the General Medical Council, for doctors, at gmc-uk.org. Search by name or by GMC number. It shows registration status, whether they hold a licence to practise, their qualifications and year, and any restrictions or sanctions currently in place.

GDC, the General Dental Council, for dentists, dental therapists, hygienists and dental nurses, at gdc-uk.org. A substantial number of aesthetic practitioners are dentists, which is entirely legitimate.

NMC, the Nursing and Midwifery Council, for nurses and midwives, at nmc.org.uk. Note that independent prescribing is a separate qualification recorded on the register, so a nurse may be registered without being a prescriber.

GPhC, the General Pharmaceutical Council, for pharmacists, at pharmacyregulation.org.uk.

Each is free, needs no account, and returns a result in seconds.

How to actually do it

Ask, before the appointment, for the full name and the profession of whoever will be treating you. Not the clinic. The person.

Then search the relevant register for that name. Two practical snags come up. People practise under names that differ from their registered one, usually after marriage, so if the search fails, ask what name they are registered under. And common surnames return several results, in which case the qualification year and place usually resolve it, or you can simply ask for their registration number.

Read what the entry actually says. Current registration is the baseline. Also look for any condition or undertaking attached to their practice, which appears on the entry and is the part most worth knowing.

The things that look like credentials and are not

The address. A Harley Street postcode is not vetted by anybody. Some buildings on the street have landlords who screen their tenants and some do not, and the name is used freely by practices some distance from it. Much of the medicine practised there is genuinely excellent. None of that is conferred by the postcode.

Membership logos. Some professional bodies verify their members rigorously. Others take a subscription. A logo in a website footer tells you nothing until you know which kind you are looking at, and the body’s own site will usually tell you.

Training certificates from product manufacturers. These record attendance at a course about a product. They are not a clinical qualification and were never meant to be read as one.

Follower counts and before-and-after galleries. These record marketing effort and photograph selection.

If the answer is no

Being unregistered is not, for most of these treatments, illegal, and some unregistered practitioners are highly experienced. The point is not that you must refuse. The point is that you should be making that decision knowingly rather than assuming a check has happened somewhere upstream.

What matters more than the presence of a registration is what happens when something goes wrong. A vascular occlusion from filler needs recognising within minutes and treating with hyaluronidase. Ask who manages a complication, whether the reversal agent is held on site, and who you telephone at nine on a Sunday evening. The quality of that answer tells you more than any certificate on the wall.

And if asking these questions produces irritation rather than a straight answer, you have learned the most useful thing available to you, at no cost, before committing to anything.