People arrive at this subject expecting one list. Somewhere, they assume, there is an official roll of approved aesthetic clinics, and a clinic is either on it or it is not. That list does not exist, and the belief that it does is the single most useful thing to get rid of before you start.
What exists instead is a set of registers, each built for a different purpose by a different body, at different times, under different statutes, with different coverage across the four nations. None of them was designed to help a member of the public choose a cosmetic treatment. All of them can be used for that anyway, if you know precisely what each one is answering.
The four kinds of register
It helps to sort them by what they are a register of, because that determines what a clean entry can possibly prove.
Registers of people. The General Medical Council, the Nursing and Midwifery Council, the General Dental Council, the General Pharmaceutical Council and the Health and Care Professions Council each maintain a statutory register of individual professionals. An entry tells you that a named individual holds a particular professional registration today, and whether any restriction has been placed on it. It tells you nothing whatever about the room you will be treated in, the company that takes your money, or the product that will be injected.
Registers of premises and services. The Care Quality Commission in England, Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Healthcare Inspectorate Wales and the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority in Northern Ireland register providers of certain regulated activities. The crucial point, covered in detail in what premises regulation covers, is that a great deal of purely cosmetic injectable work falls outside these schemes entirely. A clinic that is not registered is very often not in breach of anything.
Registers of legal and financial entities. Companies House tells you which limited company sits behind a trading name, who its directors are, when it was incorporated and whether it has filed what it must. The Financial Services Register tells you whether the firm offering you a payment plan is authorised to do that. Neither says anything about clinical competence.
Voluntary registers. The Joint Council for Cosmetic Practitioners and Save Face are private bodies that publish lists of practitioners who have applied to them and met their published criteria. They are not statutory regulators, membership is not a legal requirement, and absence from them is not a finding of any kind. What they are and are not is the subject of its own procedure.
| Register | What it is a register of | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| General Medical Council | Doctors | Is this person a registered doctor, and do they hold a licence to practise |
| Nursing and Midwifery Council | Nurses and midwives | Is this person a registered nurse, and do they hold a prescribing annotation |
| General Dental Council | Dentists and dental care professionals | Is this person registered, and in which dental title |
| General Pharmaceutical Council | Pharmacists and pharmacy technicians | Is this person a registered pharmacist, and are they an independent prescriber |
| Health and Care Professions Council | Fifteen regulated professions | Is this person registered in a protected title such as paramedic |
| CQC, HIS, HIW, RQIA | Providers of certain regulated activities, by nation | Is this provider registered to carry on a regulated activity here |
| Companies House | Companies and their officers | Which legal entity is behind this trading name |
| Financial Services Register | Authorised financial firms | May this firm lawfully offer me credit or a payment plan |
| JCCP and Save Face | Voluntary applicants | Has this practitioner applied to, and been accepted by, a private register |
A framework written by this publication to organise the procedure. It is not a measurement, a guideline or a regulator's classification.
The order to check them in
Order matters, because each check narrows the next. Start with the entity, then the individual, then the premises, then the money.
- Establish the legal entity. Find the company or sole trader you will be contracting with, and its company number if it has one.
- Establish the individual. Get the full name and registration number of the person who will treat you, and check it on the register that issued it.
- Establish the prescriber, if a medicine is involved. Ask who will assess you and write the prescription, and check that person separately.
- Establish the premises position. Work out whether the service is one that requires registration in your nation, and if it does, check the inspectorate.
- Establish the money. If credit or a payment plan is offered, check the lender and the broker on the Financial Services Register.
- Save the evidence. Dated screenshots of each entry, and the written answers you were given.
Working in that order stops you from doing what almost everyone does, which is to find a professional registration, feel reassured, and never ask who is legally responsible for the treatment or where the medicine came from.
Getting the name right is most of the work
Almost every failed register search fails for the same reason. You typed a trading name into a register of people, or a first name and surname into a register of companies, or the name of the person on reception rather than the person holding the syringe.
Before you search anything, get four pieces of information in writing. Not over the phone, in writing, because you will need to be able to reread them.
- The full legal name of the individual who will carry out your treatment, spelled as it appears on their registration.
- Their professional registration number and which body issued it.
- The full registered company name and company number of the business you are contracting with, which is not always the name above the door.
- If a medicine is involved, the name of the prescriber, who is not always the same person as the injector.
A provider who will not put those four things in writing has answered your question. There is no lawful reason to withhold a registration number from a prospective patient, and the request is entirely ordinary. If you feel awkward asking, the wording in how to ask for evidence without being awkward about it is written to be copied.
- Open
- Companies House, the free public company search
find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk - Type in
- The trading name of the clinic. If nothing sensible comes back, ask the clinic in writing for its registered company name and company number and search that instead.
- A good result looks like
- One company whose name or registered address matches what you were told, with a filing history, named directors, and accounts filed when due.
- An ambiguous result looks like
- Several similar names, a company incorporated very recently while the website claims long establishment, a registered address that is a mail forwarding service with no connection to the treatment address, or the clinic declining to tell you the company name at all. None of these is proof of wrongdoing. Each is a reason to ask a direct follow up question.
- What it does not prove
- That the company provides safe or competent treatment. Companies House performs no assessment of any kind. It records what has been filed. A company can be perfectly filed and clinically poor, and a new company can be clinically excellent.
- Note
- If the business is a sole trader rather than a company it will not appear at all, which is normal. In that case ask for the individual's full name and trading address in writing, because you will need them for any consumer law claim.
The gaps nobody advertises
Three gaps between these registers cause most of the confusion, and they are worth stating plainly.
The first gap is between the person and the place. A registered clinician can lawfully treat you in an unregistered room, because for many cosmetic procedures no premises registration is required at all. Checking one does not check the other.
The second gap is between the prescriber and the injector. For a prescription only medicine, the person who assesses you and writes the prescription and the person who administers the injection may be two different people, and only one of them may need to be a prescriber. Which is lawful and which is not is set out in which treatments legally require a prescriber.
The third gap is between the product and the procedure. Botulinum toxin is a medicine and is controlled as one. Most dermal fillers are regulated as medical devices, and in most of the United Kingdom no professional registration of any kind is legally required to inject one into an adult. That is not a loophole somebody forgot to close. It is the current state of the law, and it is the single most important thing a patient can understand before choosing a filler provider.
Reading restrictions, conditions and sanctions
Every statutory register publishes more than a yes or no. Look for the fields that record whether anything has been placed on the registration. The wording differs between regulators but the categories are broadly comparable: conditions, undertakings, suspension, and erasure or removal.
Two things to hold in mind while reading them. A registration with conditions is still a registration, and the conditions may be entirely unrelated to the treatment you want. Equally, a clean entry today records the position today, and registers are updated as decisions are made rather than continuously in real time. Print or screenshot what you see, with the date visible. If something goes wrong later, the contemporaneous record of what the register said on the day you booked is worth having.
The four nations diverge, and the divergence is real
The registers of people are United Kingdom wide. The registers of premises are not. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have their own inspectorate, their own statutory basis and their own scope, and the differences are not cosmetic. A treatment that requires the provider to be registered in one nation may require nothing in another.
England has also legislated for a licensing scheme specific to non surgical cosmetic procedures, in section 180 of the Health and Care Act 2022. That section confers a power to make regulations. It does not by itself create a licence you can look up. The current commencement position, and how to check it yourself rather than believe anybody's summary of it including ours, is set out in the licensing position in England.
Keep the file
Everything on this site assumes you are building a small file: screenshots of register entries with dates, the written answers to the four questions above, the quotation, the consent documents, the product name and batch number, and the aftercare instructions. It takes twenty minutes. If nothing goes wrong you will never open it. If something does go wrong, the difference between a complaint that goes somewhere and one that does not is almost always whether that file exists.
The consolidated version of every procedure on this site, in the order you would actually run them, is on the checklist.