A woman from Kent, who suffered serious burns after using a sunbed, has secured £3,500 in compensation with the help of Thompsons Solicitors.

The 28-year-old woman visited a local tanning salon for the first time and was advised by a salon employee to use the sunbed for 10 minutes, despite information on the salon wall which recommended a maximum use of five minutes.

As a result of the over-exposure to the UV lamp, the woman’s skin burned and blistered. The damage to her skin was so serious that she needed hospital treatment. Her burns took two weeks to reduce and four weeks to heal and she has been left with permanent scarring to her stomach and thighs.

After the incident, the woman contacted personal injury specialists, Thompsons Solicitors, to investigate a claim for compensation.

She said: “I was in agony for weeks because of the burns to my skin and the wrong advice from the tanning salon. I couldn’t believe the way I was treated by the staff at the salon. After the incident I went back to complain, and shockingly, their offer of compensation was free sunbed sessions.

“The one session on a sunbed completely ruined a holiday with my son because I couldn’t go in the pool with him and I couldn’t stay in a seated position for any length of time, I also couldn’t drive for weeks. I was determined to make a claim against the company to make sure that they stopped giving out bad advice and took the consequences of that poor advice seriously.”

Harriet Wheeler, from Thompsons Solicitors, said: “The salon employee should never have been advising clients on the use of sunbeds if she wasn’t adequately trained to do so. Employers have a responsibility to ensure their staff are adequately trained on the safe use of equipment. In this case they clearly failed.

“It is unbelievable that the salon thought a woman badly burned and scarred for life could be bought off with a free course of sunbeds. This equipment is dangerous in the wrong hands and it’s right that having badly injured someone they were brought to book.”