How are you spending your holiday?

While most people are spending their holdiays on the beach or visiting ancient monuments more and more Britons are spending their holdiays in hospital beds! Not through holiday accidents; but by choosing to have plastic surgery.

France is one of the countries that is attracting a large number of people now opting to travel abroad for face lifts, tummy tucks, liposuction, breast enlargements or breast reductions and dental work at half the cost of the same operations in the United Kingdom.

With NHS waiting lists growing more than 50,000 Britons travelled abroad for treatment last year; a rise of 25% on 2005.

Dental work of crowns, implants, bridges and veneers is the most popular reason for people to seek medical treatment abroad with cosmetic surgery a very close second. Hip and knee replacements, laser eye surgery and cateract removal are also operations people are prefering to have performed overseas.

Britons are spending around £160million a year on medical treatment abroad and researchers predict that NHS budget shortfalls, increasing waiting lists, MRSA and other hospital superbugs in the United Kingdom will increase the trend.

The medical tourism firm Treatment Abroad have seen visits to their internet site increase from 3000 to 60,000 a month and Barrhead Travel are launching their medical holidays to countries including France, Norway, Belgium, Germany and Eygpt.