✨ Aesthetic / Medical Spa · Utah
Utah: medical director and delegated services for an aesthetic or medical spa
Whether Utah requires a physician medical director for an aesthetic or medical spa, the qualifications, duties, and what the state says about the staff who deliver protocol-driven services.
Qualifications
Physician (MD or DO) with an unrestricted Utah license, or an APRN with an unrestricted Utah license; Utah is unusual in letting an APRN fill this role outright rather than only as a delegate under a physician.
Duties the rule assigns
- supervise (at the direct/indirect/general tier the specific procedure requires under § 58-1-506) each delegated cosmetic medical procedure
Notes
Utah statute does not use the term 'medical director'; it defines a 'cosmetic medical procedure supervisor' role instead, with three supervision tiers (direct, indirect and general) rather than a single facility-wide director designation. The citation is drawn from a compliance vendor's rule summary; confirm the exact statutory language before relying on it.
Sources (2)
- Utah Code §§ 58-1-505, 58-1-506
- Utah Admin. Code R156-1-506 (80-hour training requirement for nonablative cosmetic procedures)
Delegated services in this practice type
Business ownership and clinical authority are separate questions in this practice type. What the state says about the staff who deliver the services.
Registered Nurses
RNs (general licensure, not an APRN) are not subject to physician-supervision or collaborative-practice-agreement requirements in Utah; RN practice under § 58-31b is defined without a physician-oversight condition, in contrast to Utah's separate, narrower LPN/CNA license tiers.
For medical-aesthetics (med-spa) businesses performing delegated medical procedures, RN ownership of the business entity does not remove the need for physician delegation and oversight of the procedures themselves.
Estheticians
Utah recently restructured its esthetics licensing (S.B. 330) into a tiered 200-hour basic esthetics permit and a 1,200-hour master esthetics license under Title 58, Ch. 11a, replacing the older standalone esthetician license. Both tiers practice independently within their scope with no physician involvement. Whether laser and IPL devices are excluded from that scope, as in most states, is not spelled out.
Whether a physician-owned entity is required for any delegated medical procedure an esthetician might perform (for example laser) is not spelled out for Utah.
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