With many aesthetic clinics temporarily closing in response to the coronavirus outbreak, aesthetic practitioners are looking to help fill resourcing gaps in the NHS.
Sharon King, co-founder of the Aesthetic Complications and Expert (ACE) Group and nurse prescriber, commented, “We have a lot of people working in aesthetics who are desperate to go out and help. I’ve been speaking to a lot of colleagues and we all think we should be doing a lot more than we are, and we’ve got skills to offer by returning to the NHS. We have a wealth of nurses who are very high skilled and as this time will have a detrimental effect on our businesses and health care generally, why not do something that will be useful?”
Aesthetic practitioner and owner of Thames Skin Clinic, Dr Anna Hemming, is also offering her services back to the NHS, and urges others to follow suit.
She commented, “As a fully qualified doctor, with several years of anaesthetic training, my skills are desperately needed at the moment. We hear daily about the increase in cases, hospital occupancy and development of service within the UK. I left the NHS performers list in December, as was required by the NHS because I was no longer able to provide an NHS service. The NHS has recalled 15,000 retired doctors, but seems to have missed the highly skilled aesthetic doctors and other private professionals working outside the larger private hospitals.”
Practitioners who have not yet been called upon who may want to offer their skills to the NHS can register here. They will need to supply their personal contact details, the areas and locations previously worked in and in what capacity they would prefer to work, if called upon.
Other clinic staff such as therapists, clinic managers, receptionist and others within the aesthetic field can also help the NHS. They are calling for 250,000 volunteers to sign up to perform tasks such as delivering medicines from pharmacies, driving patients to appointments, bringing them home from hospital or making regular phone calls to check on people isolating at home.
