The All-Party Parliamentary Group fails this aesthetic nurse

This year has been another octennial year for the medical aesthetic sector—yes, those of us who are employed within medical aesthetics are practising and work within a sector, not an industry; although the words industry and sector are used interchangeably, they are not the same. The UK healthcare sector is one of the top five employers globally, employing some 1.5 million people (Nuffield Trust, 2019). Furthermore, there is another health sector, working alongside and supporting the NHS: the private and independent healthcare sector, which, in my opinion, is where medical aesthetics sits.

Last month's publication of the All-Party Parliamentary Group's (APPG) (2021) report into the beauty, aesthetics and wellbeing industry sought to both champion the ‘industry’ and tackle the prejudice that it experiences. It ran a 6-week call for written evidence in June 2020 and invited witnesses to give oral evidence in its inquiry before publishing its concluding report and its 17 recommendations, which were divided into six areas of scope for the Government to cogitate: legal definitions; standards and qualifications; regulation and enforcement; ethics and mental health; insurance; and social media and advertising. I thought that it was promising, until I read the report. They found that there is much good practice from aesthetic practitioners in the beauty and ‘medic industries’—what exactly is a medic industry? Regarding standards and qualifications, the report makes several references to the Health Education England (HEE) framework for training, which is an outdated reference from the APPG, as the Joint Council of Cosmetic Practitioners (JCCP) has had ownership of what were the HEE standards (2015) for some time.