This may be the first question to arise when you are thinking in getting plastic surgery in other country different from yours. The first think to take in mind are the reasons why getting a surgical procedure can be unsafe. First lets take a look a these factors: Medical Facilities, Doctor Expertise and Patient Post Surgical Care.Medical Facilities:
It is absolutely logical to think that if you get a surgery in a place where the very basic conditions of hygiene are not met you are taking too much risk, and that is true, if the instruments that the doctors use are not sterilized then you can get very severe infections that can cause you death, also if the rooms where you are going to spend the post surgical care time are not very clean and the sheets and pillows are not clean then you will have serious problems to heal, but let's get real, many of the Doctors who practice cosmetic surgery are very responsive with their job specifically with the rooms they operate on, the nurses they have, the instruments they use, and this is mostly because they know every aspect of the risks involved in getting the knife over you. Of course there are 'doctors' who doesn't take all the necessary measures but the true is that those 'doctors' are not real doctor or just they don't have the enough professionalism and ethics to practice this honored career. Is in this case when the right chose of a medical tourism operator get absolutely critical because they should tell you who are the doctors (this is usually difficult because they work with more than two or three at a time) and what facilities they use; this last point is essential because most of the risk are on the operating room rather than in the post operating care room or in the doctor's practice. This is usually simple because with the very name of the clinic or hospital that the medical tourism operator use you can go to Google or MSN or Yahoo and find that facility website, if you cant find the website of the facility then you should take extra care because usually the good medical facilities have at least a simple website.
Doctor Expertise:
Let's be serious it is not the same a 25 years old surgeon than a 50 years old one, expertise makes the master and in the case of surgery is not the exception, but you must take in mind that doctors get great expertise very quickly in the cosmetic surgery field because of the amount of procedures they do in a year. This is true because when you have done a task over and over again you start to get practice and start to manage certain kind of expertise in the field, but anyway in the case of cosmetic surgery a doctor with expertise of less than 5 years is not as reliable as one with 10 or 15 years. Do the numbers: a common doctor can make 1 or 2 procedures in one day, if you multiply that by 5 years is a big number but if you multiply it by 10 or 15 you get not only a bigger number of procedures, but also a level of expertise superior to the number of procedures that is because, again, when a doctor as made certain number of procedures in his life he(she) starts to develop a personal technique that assures that the surgery is going to be successful because he (she) knows every risk that could be involved and he controls every aspect of the surgery. So don't be afraid of a young doctor, be afraid of a doctor who make less than 30 procedures in a month.
You should also check the diploma of the doctor and all the courses, seminars, and other academic experience he (she) have, that will give you an idea of the quality of the doctor. As an example, many of the Latin American doctors have diplomas in very recognized universities around the world because they know that the academic experience they get on those ambients are absolutely crucial in their career.
Patient Post Surgical Care:
When you get out of the operating room you will be taken to a room where everything is absolutely controlled, oxygen supply, monitoring equipment, etc, but that is mostly for the first night after that you will be taken to a hotel where you will stay most of your recovering time; if this place is not correctly equipped and you don't have the correct care then you may have problems in your healing process. Usually the medical tourism operator will accommodate you in a hotel nearby to medical facility or to doctor's practice but this is not enough, you will need special care and this can be provided only by a certified nurse, this is why when you arrange a medical tourism package you must get this included because it is absolutely necessary for you. If you are going to travel with a friend or a relative you can sleep in the same room with them but they must follow all the rules the doctor and the nurse give to avoid most of the risk that can be generated by the presence of another person in the same room of a patient in recovery. These rules can be from using scrubs to do not use the same bath room than the patient.
A last but not least important factor is the quality of plastic surgery in the country you are going to, usually this is linked to the prices of the procedure but this is not a matter of concern if you relate it to quality, the prices in other countries (Latin American mostly) are significantly lower because supplies are cheaper due to money exchange, economical aperture and many other factors that let the prices keep low comparing to the USA or other countries.
So the safety of getting cosmetic surgery in another country is related to those factors, others may exists but I consider that these are the most important.
