How to choose a safe aesthetics practitioner

Choose a practitioner who is on a healthcare regulator's public register, who either prescribes or works with a prescriber who sees you in person, who is insured for the treatment you are having, and who can tell you exactly what happens if something goes wrong. You can check every one of those before you book.

Not comprehensively, and not yet. The firm rules that exist are narrow. It is against the law in England to give anyone under 18 filler for cosmetic reasons, and a prescription-only medicine has to be prescribed by someone qualified to prescribe it. Beyond those, non-surgical cosmetic treatment in England is, at the time of writing (October 2026), largely unregulated.

The Health and Care Act 2022 gave the Government the power to create a licensing scheme for non-surgical cosmetic procedures in England. The Department of Health and Social Care consulted in 2023, received nearly 12,000 responses, and published its response in August 2025, confirming a three-tier model based on risk. The highest-risk procedures would be restricted to regulated healthcare professionals in settings registered with the Care Quality Commission, and treatments such as facial dermal fillers would need a local authority licence and oversight by a named healthcare professional.

At the time of writing, the scheme is not in force, so no clinic can yet be licensed under it. Until it is, checking credentials is largely down to you.

In aesthetics, the prescribers you are likely to meet are doctors, dentists, nurses and pharmacists. Each profession has a regulator, and each regulator keeps a free public register online:

• the General Medical Council for doctors
• the General Dental Council for dentists
• the Nursing and Midwifery Council for nurses
• and the General Pharmaceutical Council for pharmacists.

Ask for the practitioner's full name and registration number, then search the register yourself. It takes about a minute, and nobody who is registered has a reason to be cagey about it.

Being registered is not the same as being able to prescribe. For doctors and dentists, prescribing comes with registration. Nurses and pharmacists need a further prescribing qualification, and their register entry shows whether they have one. For example, the NMC register records Alicia Marsland, who leads this clinic, as a registered nurse and, since October 2021, as an independent and supplementary prescriber.

Because some treatments involve a prescription-only medicine, which has to be prescribed for you, as an individual, by a prescriber who has assessed you. In many clinics the person treating you cannot prescribe, so a prescriber they have an arrangement with signs off the prescription. In some cases that prescriber has never met you.

Since 1 June 2025, the Nursing and Midwifery Council has required nurse and midwife prescribers to assess patients face to face before prescribing for non-surgical cosmetic procedures. Remote prescribing is no longer permitted. If you have never met the person who prescribed your treatment, that is worth questioning.

It matters for dermal filler too, even though filler is not prescription-only. The enzyme that dissolves filler in an emergency has to be prescribed. A practitioner who cannot prescribe it is relying on reaching someone who can, at the moment it is needed.

Registers accredited by the Professional Standards Authority, which oversees the UK's health and care regulators. Save Face is open only to doctors, nurses, dentists and prescribing pharmacists, and every practitioner and clinic is assessed against a detailed standard and inspected in person. The JCCP, the Joint Council for Cosmetic Practitioners, runs a similar accredited register.

Both can be searched on their own websites. Joining is voluntary, so a careful practitioner may not be on either. But one who tells you they are should come up when you look.

Cover for the treatment you are having, given by the person who will give it. 'We're insured' is not an answer on its own. A policy can cover some treatments and not others, and public liability cover, which many businesses hold, is not the same as cover for the treatment itself.

Ask three things:

• who the insurer is
• whether the policy covers this treatment
• and whether it covers the person who will treat you. Someone with the right cover can answer all three straight away.

A good clinic can tell you in detail before you are treated. The serious risk with dermal filler is vascular occlusion, where filler enters or presses on a blood vessel. It can damage the skin and, very rarely, affect sight. It is uncommon, and what decides the outcome is whether it is recognised early and treated at once.

So ask:

• whether the enzyme that dissolves filler is kept on the premises, rather than ordered when it is needed
• whether there is a written emergency protocol
• who you call at 10pm, and whether anyone will answer
• and whether managing complications costs extra.

Walk away, or at least slow down, if you see any of these:

• treatment offered on the day without a proper assessment of your face and medical history
• pressure to decide before you have had time to think, or to pay for a course on the spot
• treatment somewhere that is not a clean, clinical room, such as a kitchen, a hotel room or a party
• before-and-after photographs that look filtered or edited
• a prescriber you never meet
• a price that looks impossible, which can mean counterfeit or grey-import product
• or an advert, offer or price for a named prescription-only medicine.

That last one is easy to spot. It is against the law in the UK to advertise prescription-only medicines to the public, so a clinic that does it openly is showing you how it treats rules it finds inconvenient.

Take these to any clinic, in Lincolnshire or anywhere else, including ours:

• Are you registered with a healthcare regulator, and what is your registration number?
• Can you prescribe, or does someone else prescribe for you, and will they see me in person?
• What insurance do you hold, and does it cover this treatment?
• Do you keep the enzyme that dissolves filler on the premises?
• What happens if I have a complication, and who do I call out of hours?
• Where do your products come from?
• Are you on a register accredited by the Professional Standards Authority, such as Save Face or the JCCP?

Any practitioner who is uncomfortable answering these is telling you something. Our own answers to every one of them are on our safety and standards page.