A nurse on the frontline of the UK's botched Turkey surgery crisis fears that schoolchildren will become the next wave of victims as more and more teens are desperate to get under the knife. Thousands of women are being sent home from major surgery in Turkey in a desperate state, putting the NHS under extreme pressure and forcing the private sector to step in.
From exploding stomachs to dead breasts, unwitting patients are having dangerous cosmetic surgeries abroad before being put on the next flight with drainage tubes still attached and no aftercare. Many have been subjected to invasive operations they didn't consent to. Tragically, some of these surgeries prove deadly.
NHS under pressure from botched surgeries
A study published in the journal BMJ Open earlier this year showed that the NHS is spending up to nearly £20,000 a time treating patients who have suffered complications from overseas surgeries, with the majority being either weight loss or cosmetic surgery. A staggering 90 per cent of health tourists were found to be women. Turkey is by far the most common destination, accounting for 61% of all such trips. But the scale of the problem is underestimated due to a lack of data, according to the analysis.
Kate Monteith-Ross has seen first-hand how the NHS is being flooded with botched Turkey surgery cases. She was so appalled at the horrors she was witnessing in A&E that she began offering free treatment for victims at her aesthetics clinic in Kent.
Teenagers seeking cosmetic procedures
With cheap flights and online advertisements by medical providers abroad rife across social media, the clinic director says that it's terrifyingly easy to be lured overseas for cheap cosmetic procedures, only to come home with life-changing complications. But it's not just the cut price fuelling the trend. The owner of The Clinic by La Ross is deeply fearful of the unrealistic beauty standards which are affecting schoolchildren, having seen exactly how they play out - with some parents begging for treatments for teens as young as 13.
Kate, who says her own nine-year-old daughter has already heard negative things about her appearance, tells the Mirror: "We get a lot of parents asking if they can bring their teenagers in for face augmentation. We say absolutely not. I actually use that as an opportunity to counsel the patients on what those conversations should look like with their children, because we are in a very, very scary time."
Sobering statistics from the Anti-Bullying Alliance show that 60 per cent of young people admitted to trying to change their appearance after experiencing bullying, while 24 per cent reduced their food intake. The youngest patient Kate has seen in her clinic was just 23.
Fatal consequences and calls for clampdown
The consequences can prove fatal. Morgan Ribeiro was just 20 years old when she died following a botched gastric sleeve surgery. The British woman paid £2,500 for the weight loss surgery, having struggled for many years with her body image. In January 2024, Morgan flew to Istanbul, Turkey, having been tempted by social media promises of an affordable and successful procedure. Tragically, she never made it home. Having been cleared to fly, Morgan fell ill with septic shock on the return journey, and the plane made an emergency stop in Belgrade, Serbia, where she died. Serbian doctors later determined that her small intestine had accidentally been cut during the operation, resulting in an infection.
According to Kate, all too often, a gastric band operation is "presented almost like an aesthetic procedure" comparable to Botox, and a "safer alternative" to a gastric bypass. Railing against this narrative, Kate warns: "It really isn't. It isn't. It's a surgical intervention that can have life-threatening implications."
Kate's clinic sees between nine and 17 patients a week who have had botched surgeries, with one of the most common cases being arm lifts, breast uplifts and implants all done at the same time. The medic treated one woman who had 11 surgeries done abroad in just two days.
"The things that we have seen in the three years we've been doing this have been absolutely crazy," she warns. "We see a lot of younger patients requesting body lifts and face lifts following rapid weight loss. They are as young as 27. We've also had patients who've come in three days post-surgery with their drains still intact. They've had nine surgeries in one day. I had one lady who had her surgery three days before she came in. She'd gone over to Romania, and she'd had a leg lift, an abdominoplasty, a BBL, a blepharoplasty, and a brow lift. Then the next morning, she went back under for a breast augmentation, an arm lift, and a rhinoplasty. To do that many surgeries and to put someone under twice is barbaric."
By the time this patient arrived at Kate's clinic, she was septic and had ulcers forming. Unable to treat her, the team had no other choice but to call for an ambulance.
Recalling another horrific case, Kate says: "A woman went abroad for weight loss surgery, and when she woke up, the person had done a fat transfer to her face. That's an incredibly dangerous procedure if it's not done correctly, and she was told she wasn't allowed to leave the hospital until she paid for it. She had to get the money sent over from the UK because they wouldn't discharge her until she paid. Horrendous. And this is the scary reality."
While glossy marketing on social media may paint a picture of a "luxury trip" for surgery abroad, Kate says that all too often this isn't the case. "People are sent glamorous videos of this beautiful multi-million-pound hospital, and when they get there, they're actually not having the surgery done there, they're being taken somewhere else. I've had patients who had gastric surgery in a Botox clinic above a shop."
Calling for a clampdown on this sort of harmful false advertising being so visible, Kate adds: "It shouldn't be allowed. They are preying on the vulnerable. You've got women and men who are lacking confidence and isolating themselves from their lives because their weight is such a big thing for them. It's impacting them in so many ways. And then they see this thing, a solution that's accessible, that's affordable, and they're sucked in."
Jessica Tye, Regulatory Projects Manager at the Advertisement Standards Agency, told the Mirror: "Over the last few years, we have been working closely with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Department of Health and Social Care to clampdown on irresponsible cosmetic surgery ads by foreign-based clinics/practitioners targeted at UK consumers. We issued an Enforcement Notice to cosmetic surgery providers based abroad, setting out the strict advertising rules in place that are designed to protect people from potential harm. We've also been working with regulatory partners both in the UK and abroad, including in Türkiye, where many UK nationals travel for treatment, to make it clear to advertisers what we expect. We also continue to use our AI-assisted Active Ad Monitoring system to effectively trawl Meta (Facebook and Instagram) for non-compliant adverts, and work with the platforms to have problem ads we identify taken down."
The Department of Health has been contacted for comment.
