Safety Matters

By: Lauren Stovall
Created on 18th February 2011

Surgery abroad is increasingly popular, but a standard travel insurance policy is automatically invalidated if you are travelling for surgery. The experts at Feeling Good Travel Insurance offer advice on how to ensure you are protected

There are many advantages to travelling abroad for cosmetic surgery – it is often cheaper and standards are usually as high as in the UK, in fact many of the surgeons you will see abroad also work for some of the big UK hospital groups.

And best of all, no one need know you’ve had surgery – you can just say you’re going on holiday, and if you look a little better when you get back, who’s to say that’s not just the benefits of a week in the sun?

However, there are also some risks attached – just as there are if you have surgery in the UK – and it’s important to have a safety net, just in case things do go wrong. As with any trip abroad, travel insurance is important, but did you know you can get specialist insurance when travelling specifically for surgery?

One of the things to bear in mind is that should there be complications with your surgery when you get home, seeing a surgeon other than the one who operated on you in the first place will cost a lot of money – most UK surgeons will charge a consultation fee, and if you do need revision surgery the costs will soon mount up.

At Feeling Good Travel, we recognise that the best person to deal with any complications arising from an operation is the surgeon who performed it, so we have included in our policy an offer to cover consultation fees and medication costs up to the value of £500, just in case you should need any emergency corrective procedures after you have been discharged.

It is also important to know that the surgeon himself is insured. In the UK, surgeons pay thousands of pounds annually to cover themselves in the event of anything going wrong. This means that they can offer revisional procedures for free to correct any problems.

If they do not have adequate liability insurance, they may well refuse to treat you, and there is a possibility that your own insurance could be invalid as you have not taken appropriate steps to ensure your own safety.

You should be able to find out whether your surgeon is insured by contacting the clinic and requesting copies of the insurance certificates. If they are unable to produce them, it is advisable to look elsewhere for treatment.