New 50th birthday gift idea: gift certificate for cosmetic surgery

Two clinics get half of Finnish business

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By Riitta Vainio
     
      There are no statistics available on the use of the services of cosmetic surgeons, but based on the figures of the largest operators in the field, it is possible to conclude that the number of aesthetic procedures performed in Finland has at least tripled in the past five years.
      Marketing of the services is intense, and to help boost the business, a person considering such surgery is offered a free consultation with a specialist nurse.
      Conspicuous marketing has increased acceptance of cosmetic surgery. This is reflected in the fact that a gift certificate to a cosmetic surgeon is no longer rare as a 50th birthday gift.
     
Annual turnover in the business is now estimated at about EUR 10 million, and the estimated number of patients is about 6,000 a year.
      The Siluetti hospital and the Nordström Hospital for Plastic Surgery are the two largest clinics, whose combined annual turnover is estimated at more than EUR 5 million. It is estimated that they account for about half of the turnover of the entire field.
      Siluetti gets about 1,500 new patients every year, whereas five years ago the number of new patients was 500. The hospital's turnover five years ago was an annual EUR 1.5 million, and has now risen to EUR 2.5 million.
      Last year, 1,000 aesthetic surgery procedures were performed at Helsinki's Eira Hospital - 1.5 times the number that took place in 2000. The most frequent procedures in Eira are eyelid surgery, facelifts, and breast augmentations or reductions.
     
The cosmetic surgery business is marketing itself with increasingly conspicuous advertising campaigns. According to Siluetti, television programmes which follow the progress of the improvement of a patient's appearance through aesthetic surgery have been the most efficient kind of marketing.
      The treatment guarantee in public health care has also increased demand for the services of plastic surgeons, because varicose vein surgery in public health care is restricted to the most difficult cases.
      Outi Kaarela, the chair of the Plastic Surgeons' Association, and head physician of the Oulu University Central Hospital, says that while the sector is growing in Finland, the growth is not as fast as in other parts of the world.
     
The high season for plastic surgeons is in the spring, when people want to tighten up folds of skin on the waistline and along the arms that have been left hanging after weight loss.
      Official interest in aesthetic surgery has surfaced only once, in the early 1990s, when a class action suit was raised in the United States over faulty breast implants.
      The National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health (STAKES) says that at that time about 500 breast augmentations were performed in Finland every year. Now the number is estimated at more than 1,000 a year. Professor Rolf Nordström has said that in recent years, he has personally performed more than 3,000 breast augmentation procedures at his clinic in recentyears.
      Under the law, all implants placed inside breasts should be registered, but STAKES says that the rule has never been enforced in Finland.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 6.3.2007


Links:
  Nordström Hospital for Plastic Surgery
  Siluetti Hospital

RIITTA VAINIO / Helsingin Sanomat
riitta.vainio@hs.fi