An insurance plan covering cosmetic surgery patients has been suggested in the wake of the French breast implant issue.
Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, who is leading a government review into the risks from faulty breast implants, said a scheme like this would protect consumers.
Sir Bruce, a medical director at the NHS, likened his idea to the protection scheme currently in place in the travel industry.
In the case of travel insurance, agents pay the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) a monthly fee to have their customers protected should anything go wrong. Sir Bruce said this type of scheme “captures the flavor of where we want to go”.
“One of the things that my review will be looking at will be something rather like the ABTA arrangement that travel agents have, which means that if an organisation runs into trouble the consumer is covered,” he said on BBC radio’s The Report.
Sir Bruces suggestions come amid the current crisis surrounding faulty breast implants. French company Poly Implant Prostheses (PIP) made breast implants with non medical grade silicone for 40,000 women in the UK and countless more worldwide.
The government said it would remove and replace the implants free of charge for customers who had their surgery on the NHS. It also said it would remove but not replace implants for women who had their surgery in private institutes which no longer exist, or refuse to do the procedure.
The Harley Medical Group, who fitted around 14,000 of the implants, and Transform are two of the private firms who are refusing to replace the implants for free, despite the “moral duty” of care to their customers the government says they have.
