Travel litigation lawyer, Isabel Bathurst, gives an expert guide to things you should think about before deciding to have a cosmetic surgery procedure abroad.
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Transcript:
If you’re travelling abroad for any procedure, particularly cosmetic surgery, you need to be aware that there are huge risks involved with the doctors. As to whether or not they’re regulated. What is the regulation in the country that you’re visiting? Is it regulated at all? If you’re investigating a doctor look at his profile. Has he got good comments? Is there anything bad that you are finding? You know, do your usual social media search about the individual. But from a risk point of view, you need to know when you sign a contract with a doctor for a particular surgery that not only are they going to do the surgery but they’ve got a plan in place for if any complication happens, if anything goes wrong. You need to know that there’s a team of people available to be able to treat you carefully if the procedure doesn’t go quite as planned.
Obviously, you’ve lost money. In terms of how much you paid for your treatment but also if you’ve been so severely affected that you can’t work, that you need care and assistance. Say for example, you came back and the surgery was so catastrophic that you were bedbound or ill and going in and out of hospital to have that surgery remedied. Your work and livelihood would be affected. You’d need additional people to help you. That is what forms part of a claim. That you can claim as a result of something that has gone wrong. A successful claim is based on evidence. You need documentary proof. It is usually borne out of arranging a contract with a medical expert abroad. If you’ve gone to see somebody at a clinic you usually have signed documentation in order to arrange the treatment. All that documentation, everything that you have in terms of receipts or any other documents for the travel, you need to keep and put together so then we can advise you on the claim.
People are often concerned that when they’ve had something go wrong whilst abroad, be it on holiday or when they have taken a trip to have surgery done, that they can actually pursue a claim when it goes wrong in England. So even if you’ve had surgery in somewhere like Turkey or Hungary, the law allows you to be able to pursue a claim in the courts of England and Wales. And even though we’d be looking at the applicable law of that country you can still pursue it here.
