Adverse events (AE) occur within all healthcare settings. When an AE occurs, it can have a negative impact on the physical, psychological and the social wellbeing of the practitioner responsible, resulting in the healthcare practitioner (HCP) becoming the second victim (SV); the affected patient being the first victim.
The term second victim was first established in a paper by Wu in 2000,1 but it was in subsequent work by Wu and other authors where detailed definitions of this phenomena began to appear.2-5 Scott (2009) described SVs as ‘healthcare providers who are involved in unanticipated adverse patient events such as medical error and/or patient-related injury where the provider of care becomes traumatised by the event’.5
It is common knowledge that there is a rise in patients requesting and receiving non-surgical cosmetic interventions and, subsequently, a rise in the number of adverse events. Despite this rise there…
