How to choose a safe injector

Ask whether your practitioner is a registered healthcare professional and what their registration number is. Nurses appear on the NMC register, doctors on the GMC, dentists on the GDC — all three registers are public and searchable, and confirming someone appears on one takes a minute.

A framed training certificate is not the same thing. Weekend courses exist that produce a certificate and very little else.

Wrinkle-relaxing injections use a prescription-only medicine. That requires a prescriber to have assessed you personally. Remote prescribing — where a prescriber signs off patients they have never met, sometimes from a list — is against professional guidance and it is more common than it should be.

Ask directly: who prescribes, and have they assessed me?

Does the clinic hold hyaluronidase on site, and is the practitioner trained to manage a vascular occlusion? A vascular occlusion is rare, it is an emergency, and the outcome depends almost entirely on how quickly it is recognised and treated.

Then ask what happens afterwards: who do you call, at what hours, and what does the clinic do if something goes wrong at the weekend?

Pressure to book immediately. Discounts for booking on the day. Treatment without a consultation, or on a first visit with no assessment. Prices far below the local market — product and indemnity cost what they cost. Group bookings and 'parties'. And any practitioner unwilling to say no to you.

One more: wrinkle-relaxing injections use a prescription-only medicine, and UK rules forbid advertising one to the public. A clinic that names the brand in its marketing is breaching those rules — a small thing, but it tells you something about how they treat the rules generally.