A WORD OF WARNING
The lack of adequate control over IPL and Laser treatments in the United Kingdom remains a concern for the consumer. It was hoped with the advent of the National Care Standards and the subsequent Health Commission that the delivery of these treatments would be at last monitored correctly and made safer for the general public to access. Things could not be further from the truth.
The National Care Standards only requires that the operator follow a protocol written by a doctor. In many instances the operator can be a nurse, an aesthetician, a beauty therapist or simply someone trained by the company supplying the laser or IPL device. There is no requirement for the doctor to oversee the treatment or indeed to take any part in the treatment. The doctor could be based many hundreds of miles from the clinic and indeed may never have met the operator or even visited the clinic. Furthermore the company supplying the device provides the training offered to users. In almost all cases this is no more than a one day training course. This in our view is inadequate and has led in many ways to a worsening of the quality of services delivered to clients.