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Interview with Dr Damien: Aesthetic training for Doctors

Damien, a medical Doctor from Antigua, came to Cosmetic Courses to pursue his career in aesthetics. After completing almost every course on our training programme, here he talks about the benefits of aesthetic training for Doctors and reflects on his time with us.

Tell us about your professional background

I’m a young businessman and qualified medical Doctor from the Caribbean. I’m currently working in the field of tourist/travel medicine, but preparing to move into aesthetics.

Why did you decide to train in aesthetics?

I was introduced to the idea by a friend who had a keen interest. As I was about to visit the UK to pursue some training in travel medicine, I decided to make the most of my time here and train in aesthetics too. I realised it was a virgin market back home, so there was a great opportunity to capitalise on it.

What attracted you to Cosmetic Courses?

I searched online and Cosmetic Courses was the company that most impressed me. There were a few others I looked at, but they didn’t seem to be very organised, and didn’t offer all the information I was looking for. You guys had thought of everything.

How many other providers did you consider?

I actually had my whole office looking! I think there were about 6 different firms. That was shortlisted to 3, then shortlisted to 2, then you guys won.

Which courses did you attend?

There are so many! Technically it’s all of them except for Lower Face Botox and Microsclerotherapy.

What did you think of the quality of our training?

Marvellous. The trainers are very experienced. I liked the fact that because they’re treating people in their practice every day they were able to tell you “do this, do that, don’t do this” and would also explain why. I feel it’s given me the confidence to make my own judgments and decisions as to the best approach to take with my patients.

What’s the biggest benefit of aesthetic training for Doctors?

Networking. Since training, my network has grown tremendously. I feel very well equipped to move into this exciting new industry.

Do you feel confident to pursue this in the future?

Absolutely.

Compared to other courses you’ve attended, how would you rate our training?

High up, very high up!

What are the next steps following your training?

Getting a business plan in place first. Then I’ll be talking to my investors, securing some finance – and making some money!

Where do you see your practice in 3 years time?

Hopefully by then I’ll have managed to spread to about 2 or 3 other islands.

Would you recommend Cosmetic Courses’ aesthetic training for Doctors to your colleagues?

Definitely!

Cosmetic Courses, led by Consultant Plastic Surgeon Adrian Richards, is the UK’s most established cosmetic training provider. For more information on aesthetic training for Doctors, please contact our team.

 

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5 great benefits of aesthetic training for Doctors

Are you a Doctor working in the NHS? Starting to want more variety from your working life? Read on for 5 compelling reasons to make aesthetic training for Doctors your next move.

1. It’s great for your bank balance

Let’s not be coy. Training in aesthetics offers you far more scope to dictate your own earnings than working as a GP.

Most aesthetic treatments can be performed in under an hour. Botox, for example, takes around 15-40 minutes depending on the areas treated. With Botox treatment typically charged at around £200 for one area, your earning potential is limited only by your own ambition.

2. More patient time

If you’re frustrated by the time pressure of the NHS, and want to spend longer with your patients, aesthetics is the perfect antidote to the NHS ‘conveyor belt’.

You can choose how much time to spend with your patients. If you enjoy patient interaction, aesthetics is much more conducive to chatting and passing the time of day.

Another crucial difference is that you’re not trying to remove a negative, as you are when you’re a GP treating unwell patients. Instead, you’re aiming to produce a positive, in the form of a great aesthetic result. So there’s far more potential for spreading joy!

3. Training is quick

In most careers, if you want to shift focus and move into a new area, you can expect a fairly lengthy retraining period. If you’re a Doctor, however, you’re in the happy position of having access to a new specialism that uses all your existing skills and experience – allowing you to qualify very quickly.

Aesthetic training for Doctors is quick to complete, with most courses taking only one day. It’s quite possible to train one week, and be treating your own aesthetic patients the next.

4. Growing market

Aesthetic treatments are hot right now. Botox alone is a billion dollar industry worldwide, and that shows no sign of slowing. In fact, demand for non-surgical aesthetic treatments is growing relative to cosmetic surgery. So getting qualified in as many non-surgical treatments as you can will make you a sought-after expert in a booming industry.

5. Long-term patient relationships

Aesthetic treatments produce impressive results for your patients – but they don’t last forever. So if a patient’s happy with their treatment, there’s a good chance they’ll return to you when needed.

And establishing long-term relationships with your patients not only makes them likely to return to you for top-ups, they may also be tempted to try new treatments you add to your repertoire.

Find out more about aesthetic training for Doctors

For more on the benefits of aesthetic training for Doctors, watch this video where Dr Sophie Shotter explains how aesthetic training helped kickstart her business.

Cosmetic Courses is the UK’s longest established medical aesthetic training provider. Our team offer a wide range of accredited aesthetic training for Doctors, Dentists and Nurses. To find out more, call the team on 01844 318798 or email [email protected].

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More training needed before entering cosmetic industry, doctors and patients say

As the law stands, newly qualified consultants can walk straight into the operating theatre and perform the full repertoire of cosmetic surgery procedures for anyone who asks.  But in a recent survey, both doctors and patients have expressed their dissatisfaction with the status quo – and called for more specialist training for cosmetic surgeons to be made a legal requirement. The poll was conducted on 2,000 women and 500 doctors to coincide with the Clinical Cosmetic and Reconstructive Expo (the UK’s biggest plastic surgery conference), which takes place next month. 93% of the doctors surveyed said that they didn’t feel newly qualified surgeons were of the required standard to provide complex specialist surgeries like facelift and breast enlargement. Even though the law says otherwise, and NHS training is deemed to be sufficient.

Which leaves a vanishingly small one in 14 clinicians who felt things were fine the way they are, and no accredited training was necessary. Three-quarters of the patients surveyed also said they would feel more confident having cosmetic surgery if they knew their surgeon had undertaken further specialist training.

When asked about non-surgical cosmetic treatments, including injectables and laser treatment, both doctors and patients agreed that comprehensive specialist training was necessary. A minority of the doctors surveyed (around a third) thought medical professionals should have a minimum of three months’ training before being allowed to perform laser treatment.

Calls and campaigns to improve standards in the industry seem to be gathering momentum. This poll comes only days after Health Education England (HEE) released the first part of their review into training for non-surgical procedures.

And the organisation Save Face is currently creating a voluntary register of non-surgical cosmetic practitioners who have been thoroughly vetted by doctors before accreditation.

We will keep a close eye on any outcomes arising from this new scrutiny on what has hitherto been a largely unregulated industry. From our point of view as medical professionals, anything that improves patient safety and raises the standard for those entering the cosmetic arena can only be healthy for the industry – and improve its reputation beyond measure.

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Marketing Your Cosmetic Business Online Part 2: Claim Your Domain

Claim Your Cyber Territory – Marketing

The second stage in our medical aesthetic business marketing blog series is to look at domain registration.

A domain name is the name of a website: cosmeticcourses.co.uk , for instance, is our teaching and training company. This is also known as the URL (uniform resource locator). Mr. Adrian Richards of Cosmetic Courses owns adrianrichards.com. But who owns variations of this, such as adrianrichards.co.uk? He tried to buy this some years ago but it was already taken by a professional person from Shropshire! Whilst researching this article, he looked it up again and this person has not renewed the registration so we have added it to our portfolio.

This is an activity you should consider performing at regular intervals to ensure that competitors are not gaining traffic for terms related to your business.

Buying Domain Names – Marketing

It can cost from under £10 a year to buy yourname.co.uk. To find out if your name is available, simply search for domain registration companies on Google and a search bar will appear. Type in your name and select .co.uk and you will see if it is available. Generally most of the more common names are taken but if you are called something unusual you may well find that it is available.

In recent years, more and more people have become aware of the value of URL’s and it is very rare to find any one or even two word combinations left. Some investment and pension schemes are even starting to value URL’s as a valuable asset which are increasing in value and are adding these to their portfolios.

You will see that there are many variations of domain endings available. (.com .biz .edu etc.) Names ending in .coms are the most popular and therefore most expensive as they are not county specific. Amazon.com for instance is the international version of Amazon, whereas Amazon.co.uk is the UK branch. If you live and work in the UK, we would advise you to buy the .co.uk version as it is likely to appear higher in searches performed within the UK.

What Happens Once You Have Bought Your Domain?

Once you have purchased your domain name, it will be registered to you and if you have entered your card details and selected the automatic renew it can be yours for as long as you want.

Once you have your domain name or names, you need to make sure they are registered to you at your address- this way you have control over them. A favorite ruse of many web design firms is for you and them to choose the name of a website and they then register it in their name. This means that technically you may not own it although you have paid for the website. In most cases this is fine but if you ever want transfer your website or have it re-designed by another company the fact that you do not own the domain may come as an unpleasant surprise.

Many astute people realized the power of domain names in the early days of internet marketing and registered lots of them for under £10. They are now worth many times this; just recently I received an offer to buy plasticsurgeon.co.uk for a figure over £10,000. Is it worth it? Why would I want it? The main reason is that URL’s containing an exact match for the term a user enters into Google are more likely to appear higher in a Google search. If I search for ‘plastic surgeon’ in Google (all other factors being equal) plasticsurgeon.co.uk will appear higher than adrianrichards.co.uk.

There is a group of experts who scour the market for high value lapsed domain names. This means that if either a large company or individual fail to re-register their domain name, after a period of time the domain is released to the first person to buy at the normal rate of under £10. This way it is possible to obtain a valuable asset for a minimal cost.

In our next Marketing Your Business Online Blog…Creating A Winning Website! If you are interested in more in-depth business marketing training for the medical aesthetics industry, Cosmetic Courses are experts in providing this. Call us today on 01844 390110 or [email protected]

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Cosmetic Courses Trainers attend Acne & Rosacea Meeting

Report by Libby Stewart, Cosmetic Courses Trainer

The on-going training of our professional team is very important to us here at Cosmetic Courses.

In order to keep delivering the best to our delegates, trainers Libby Stewart and Ruth Atkins yesterday attended a day on skin health and diagnosing and treating acne and rosacea

The meeting was organised by the British Association of Cosmetic Nurses, a professional organisation of which the girls are both members. One of the aims of the BACN is to ensure that nurses in the aesthetic industry are well informed and well educated in the latest techniques and treatment methodology.

The course was held in the prestigious setting of the Wellcome Foundation and was hosted by Galderma. Galderma are one of the leading producers of presciption medicines relating to skin health as well as manufacturing Azzalure, a brand of wrinkle relaxing injectable medicine.

This is therefore very valuable background knowledge regarding skin contraindications, not just for nurses on our botox training courses but all medical professionals attending Cosmetic Courses medical aesthetic training. Look out for a detailed report from Libby Stewart about treating clients with acne and rosacea, coming soon on the Cosmetic Courses blog!

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Entering the Medical Aesthetic Industry: Be Realistic, not Pessimistic!

Be Realistic…but Stay Positive: You Can Do It!

There has been a trend recently to draw awareness to the fact that entering the Aesthetic Industry is not always plain sailing.

Quite rightly, skeptics have stressed the perils of skipping blindly away from your day job (which may have its downsides but nonetheless pays the bills, right?) after promises of reduced working hours, more input and creative freedom…not to mention money, money, money.

So, What Does it Take?

Let’s be sensible here: Everything in life, particularly with an economy like ours in the UK today, is what you make of it. As Elton John penned in “The Circle of Life”: Some will fall by the wayside, others will shoot to the stars. But a great deal in this industry comes down to:

a)having the required skillset to begin with. This is why the best training providers will, like Cosmetic Courses, only take on medical professionals. We talk about Insurance but this is a very real issue: if you can’t get insured after your training, you won’t get work, therefore it simply would not be fair for us to train you under false pretences. Also, we have found that professionals from roles like Nurses, Doctors and Dentists already have a high number of the skills required to make it in this sector. For more information on this, take a look at our brand new Transferable Skills pages for Doctors, Nurses and Dentists.

b)Ability to network. This is partially being in the right place at the right time, but largely putting yourself out there and making contacts, getting to know others within the industry who can recommend products and techniques, introduce clients…and possibly even provide jobs or partnerships! Self-promotion is absolutely vital so you do need a strong backbone and a creative streak (which of course you have already to be considering Aesthetics!). With online resources like Linked-In, Gumtree, Facebook and regular conferences to attend…the medical aesthetic world really is your oyster.

Market Yourself

To illustrate this point further, here is a real recent enquiry from a Delegate. This both shows the need to be realistic about the industry you are considering going into, and the things that can be done to ensure you give yourself the best chance possible:

Question:
Dear Cosmetic Courses,

I took a medical aesthetic training course in April 2010, and have yet to get my first client! I work full time, as a Practice Nurse, and realise I  may not have promoted myself enough. I have advertised myself in a local dentists, and beauty salon.

Answer from Libby Stewart, Cosmetic Courses Aesthetic RGN:

It can be difficult to get going with your practice.
You could consider holding an open evening at a salon or practice to inform potential patients of what treatments you can offer and how the treatments may work for them. People seem to need more than an advertisement to encourage them. Patients who are regulars to procedures are usually happy to stay with their existing practitioner unless something interests them to leave eg. your prices or they just like you better. Patients who are new to treatment and just considering it need a lot of encouragement and benefit from a good consultation so that you can establish a relationship with them.
Yes, the insurance has to be paid once you commence treatments but most of the companies allow for monthly payments that you can cancel at any time should you find this is not the right field for you. Remember that what initially looks like quite a mark up on product cost can seem less of a profit when you take purchase of product and consumables, paying yourself an houly rate, any rent or commission that you pay to a third party and insurance and training costs incurred by you into consideration. So the price you charge for your treatments should reflect all of these to make sure you still make a profit!

Cosmetic Courses are always on hand and happy to offer advice if you are Entering the Aesthetic Industry or about your Business and Marketing Strategy. 24 hour Advice is available through our Telephone Line, 01844 390110…simply leave your question and we will get in touch very quickly!

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