Doctors say Brits book risky operations abroad despite multiple deaths

Medical experts are warning about the impact on the NHS of Brits booking risky operations abroad after multiple deaths. People are arranging to have procedures overseas where they might be cheaper or have a shorter waitlist after finding out about them on social media. 

The British Medical Association’s annual meeting in Belfast heard that this rise has led to a surge in “serious post-surgery complications and deaths”. And it means more people are asking the NHS to pick up the pieces afterwards, they warn.

Delegates at the meeting passed a motion expressing concern about the patients who return from abroad requiring emergency treatment and called for more weight management services.

Medics claim they are left having to “pick up the pieces” from the likes of weightloss surgeries or hair transplants abroad as patients return home with infections, complications or lacking the necessary “wraparound” care.

Some hospitals have reportedly been forced to cancel elective procedures due to the beds being taken up by someone who needed emergency help to fix an overseas procedure from what is known as medical tourism. 

Dr Samuel Parker said: “(There are) reports of shortcuts, inappropriate use of disposable instruments and patients suffering serious complications necessitating emergency NHS treatment,” the Guardian reports.

Chair of the BMA’s board of science, David Strain, claimed surgical tourism has been a “problem for some time”, adding: “Complications can arise late from any procedure, not just obesity surgery – even just something as simple as hair implants that people travel for. 

“You can get infections and the problem is people come back and they are asking the NHS to pick up the pieces for procedures that were done with less standards that we would normally apply in the UK.”

He credited the rise in surgical tourism with international travelling becoming easier following the pandemic and the internet enabling patients to organise procedures abroad, branding the UK a “social media nation”.

Dr Strain cautioned that this trend is placing more pressure on “an already overburdened health service”.

The Foreign Office warns that standards of medical facilities and treatments can “vary widely globally”, poignantly noting how six British nationals died in Turkey last year following medical procedures.