Cosmetic surgeon’s unanswered questions
Despite agreeing to meet our reporter, Dr Vasilescu fails to show up to discuss our concerns
GIVING an interview on Romanian TV, Dr Dana Vasilescu looks every inch the modern medic, resplendent in her scrubs and doctor’s white coat.
The 46- year- old tells viewers about the benefits and perils of breast surgery in a five- minute segment of the magazine show Focus Magazin broadcast in February.
Conspicuous by its absence, however, is any mention of the patients in the UK who say their lives have suffered following breast surgery she performed on them.
Dr Vasilescu has positioned herself as one of Romania’s celebrity plastic surgeons since returning to her homeland.
Her Facebook page is full of self- promotion material about how successful her cosmetic operations are – including claims she gave Claudia Ghitulescu, a famous Romanian folk singer, a Botox injection on her wedding day earlier this year.
Three of her upset patients in the UK, Tracey Foley, Stacey Allen and Kirsty Adam, had hoped they could pursue her for damages through the firm she set up in Scotland to carry out surgical work.
Although the women thought Dr Vasilescu was working for cosmetic firm Transform, the contracts they signed state the surgeons are all self- employed and therefore do not work for Transform.
Transform, however, insists it has covered the cost of corrective procedures for these three women, as it always does should a surgeon recommend it. Dr Vasilescu set up a company called DCV Aesthetic Solutions Ltd to handle her work in the UK.
The company was incorporated in May, 2015, by Dr Vasilescu and Nicolae Vasilescu, who is believed to be her husband.
The company, dissolved 18 months later in November, 2016, was registered to a rented two- bedroom £ 200,000 flat in Haymarket, Edinburgh.
Accounts show the firm made nearly £84,000 in 2016.
Last week when we visited the Hay market address, local residents said Dr Vasilescu had long since left.
As well as the patients highlighted today, there are other complaints on internet message boards about the standard of work carried out by Dr Vasilescu.
But it’s important to note we also found other former patients praising her work – on an internet forum called So Feminine, one patient said: “I cannot fault her.”
Posting on July 21, 2015, the same woman added: “Yes, she was very blunt with me regarding sizing and what she would and wouldn’t do, but that’s the reason I went ahead with her and I’m glad I did.
“My whole experience with Transform has been brilliant and they made me feel so at ease.”
Dr Vasilescu has since returned
to Eastern Europe where she trained and qualified as a doctor.
As well as running a private clinic, she works as a surgeon in the burns unit of the Floresca Hospital, a run-down state facility in downtown Bucharest.
The building is awash with exhausted-looking doctors hurrying through strip-lit corridors in their scrubs.
On the third floor of the dark and tired ’ 50s building, The Sunday Post spoke to colleagues who confirmed Dr Vasilescu was at work.
One member of staff telephoned her and she agreed to meet our reporter to discuss the allegations.
But she did not turn up to the arranged meeting.
When another colleague telephoned her she agreed to speak by phone later.
But subsequently, she did not pick up the phone or respond to several text messages asking for her version of events.
Telephoned from a Romanian number later, Dr Vasilescu did answer, but immediately hung up when told she was speaking to The Sunday Post.
Dr Vasilescu is believed to live in a large, detached villa, in a residential street in Otopeni, a city 10 miles outside Bucharest’s ringroad near the airport.
We called at her home but was told by a member of the household she was at work.
The villa is a two-storey modern house, in a narrow residential street.
It is surrounded by a high wall and looks on to scrubland.
After qualifying as a doctor in 1996, Dr Vasilescu worked at an emergency ward in Bucharest and carried out humanitarian work in the Congo for the UN in 1997.