Fixing botched plastic surgeries carried out overseas, including in Turkey, costs the NHS in Britain £94 million a year and takes much-needed hospital beds away from patients, a leading plastic surgeon has warned.

NHS consultant Dr Rajan Uppal has said that the government needs to act to deal with the worsening trend of people using Britain’s health service as an ‘insurance policy’ when they head to dodgy clinics overseas.

‘There are little old ladies sitting in a corridor while British patients who have had boob jobs overseas and made the choice to go there are filling beds,’ he said. ‘It’s just not what the public thinks the NHS is for.’

He and fellow doctors at an NHS Trust in Surrey say they see at least see one Brit with complications every month, as thousands continue to jet off to clinics – despite the increased risks posed by cut-price surgeries.

With some clinics offering cosmetic surgery packages for as little as £3,000, and often ‘aggressively’ marketing and upselling procedures, Dr Uppal said many are ‘preying on poor people who can’t afford expensive plastic surgery in the UK.’

Explaining his workings regarding the true cost of this to the NHS, he said that if one patient a month requires treatment across each of the more than 900 hospitals in the UK, this would lead to an estimated annual cost of £94m and 58,000 days of lost NHS beds.

‘It’s a scandal really,’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t a burden on the NHS I wouldn’t mind, people are grown ups they can do what they want.’

He added that what he found particularly shocking was the apathy of some patients, who come into NHS hospitals expecting to be looked after, and believe they have saved money in the process. ‘Patients don’t care, they get through it and think ‘that’s fine, I’ve got away with it’.

Dr Uppal said that one solution could be to invoice British patients for treatments, in the same way that people coming from abroad who use NHS services are, if they are coming in for help with cosmetic treatments they chose to have done.