How To Choose A Hair Transplant Clinic: 7 Checks To Make
A hair transplant is surgery. It is elective, it is usually paid for privately, and it is one of the very few operations people book largely on the strength of an advert. That combination is exactly why the industry has the reputation it does.
The good news is that almost everything you need to check is a matter of public record, and most of it takes about twenty minutes. Here is what to look at before you hand over a deposit.
1. Is the clinic registered with the CQC?
In England, any provider carrying out surgical procedures must be registered with the Care Quality Commission. Scotland has Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Wales has Healthcare Inspectorate Wales, and Northern Ireland has the RQIA. Registration is not optional and it is searchable online, free, by anybody.
There is a catch that catches people out. Check the registered name matches the name you are being sold to. Some unregulated brokers rent a room inside registered premises and trade under their own brand. The building is registered. The people taking your money are not, and if something goes wrong you will discover that the two are entirely separate.
2. Who is actually performing the surgery?
Get a name, then check that name on the GMC register. Every doctor practising in the UK must be on it, it is public, and it tells you whether they hold a licence to practise and whether there are any restrictions on it.
Then ask a more awkward question: which parts of the procedure will the surgeon personally carry out? A hair transplant involves extracting the grafts, making the recipient sites and placing the grafts. It is normal and entirely proper for trained technicians to assist. It is not proper for the doctor to appear briefly at the start and leave the rest to unsupervised staff. Ask, and expect a straight answer.
Membership of the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery is a good sign of specialist commitment. It is voluntary rather than mandatory, so its absence alone is not damning, but GMC registration is not optional and its absence absolutely is.
3. Will they tell you if you are not suitable?
This is the single most revealing question, and it is the one that separates a clinic from a sales operation.
Not everybody should have a hair transplant. If your donor area is too thin, if your hair loss has not stabilised, if you are too young for the pattern to have settled, or if the loss is caused by something a transplant cannot fix, then the honest answer is no, or not yet. Roughly four in ten of the people who come to us are told exactly that.
A clinic that says yes to everyone is not unusually skilled. It is selling. If nobody has explained what your donor supply is, how far it will stretch, and what your head is likely to look like in fifteen years, you have had a sales pitch rather than an assessment.
4. Are your grafts being counted, or guessed?
A proper assessment involves examining the donor and recipient areas under magnification and calculating how many follicular units are needed for the coverage and density being discussed. That number should be given to you, and the price should follow from it.
If you are quoted a firm price before anyone has looked closely at your head, the number has come from a price list rather than from your hair.
5. Indemnity insurance, in the clinic’s own name
Indemnity insurance is standard across the professions. Ask to see the clinic’s policy and look carefully at the name printed on it. It should be the clinic’s trading name, not an individual surgeon’s, and not a different company you have never heard of. If the surgeon moves on, a policy in their name is of limited use to you.
6. What happens afterwards, and what happens if it goes wrong
Ask what aftercare is included, over what period, and who you call at eleven o’clock at night in the first week if you are worried. Ask what the clinic does if the result falls short, and get that answer in writing rather than as reassurance in a consultation room.
It is also worth knowing how long the clinic has traded. Companies House is free to search. Hair takes the better part of a year to grow in, so a clinic that has been going for six months cannot yet know what its own twelve month results look like.
7. Think very carefully about going abroad
Cheap procedures overseas are the single biggest source of the corrective work we see. The problem is rarely the price on the day. It is that UK regulators have no jurisdiction, the surgeon may never have been identified to you, aftercare ends when the flight home takes off, and correcting a bad transplant is far more difficult and far more expensive than doing it properly the first time. Donor hair spent badly cannot be recovered.
We covered this in more detail when ITV News reported on unlicensed clinics operating in the UK.
The short version
- Registered with the CQC, under the same name you are being sold to
- A named surgeon you have checked on the GMC register
- A clear answer on who does which part of the procedure
- A graft count based on examining your head, not a price list
- Indemnity insurance in the clinic’s name
- Written aftercare, and a written position on what happens if it falls short
- Real reviews on independent sites, and before and after photographs of their own patients
- A willingness to tell you no
If a clinic is reluctant about any of those, that reluctance is your answer.
You can see our own results in our before and after gallery, or read about the procedure on our hair transplants page. To get an honest assessment of whether surgery is right for you, book a free video assessment.
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