A Systematic Review of Training to Improve Melanoma Diagnostic Skills in General Practitioners

• Published in: Journal of Cancer Education Vol. 31; no. 4; pp. 730 - 735
• Main Authors: Chia, Alvin, Trevena, Lyndal
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.12.2016; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Attrition (Research Studies); Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; Cancer; Cancer Research; Clinical Diagnosis; Evidence; Guidelines; Melanoma; Outcome Measures; Pharmacology/Toxicology; Physicians; Public Health; Systematic review; Training; Training Methods; Australia; General practitioners; Melanoma; Diagnosis
• ISSN: 0885-8195; 1543-0154
• DOI: 10.1007/s13187-015-0864-6

Australia has the highest incidence of melanoma in the world. General practitioners encounter melanoma in 9.9 per 10,000 clinical encounters and play a key role in diagnosis. A systematic review was conducted to study the efficacy of training methods to improve general practitioners’ diagnostic skills in melanoma. Article abstracts (1307) were screened, from a Medline search. Four trials met our criteria and were highly variable in their intervention methods and outcome measures. The Cochrane risk of bias tool was used to assess study quality with only one good, one poor, and two of questionable quality. Our results showed limited evidence via one study that training of general practitioners in surface microscopy improved melanoma diagnosis, from a clinical (naked eye) pre-intervention score of 54.6 % to a post-intervention surface microscopy score of 75.9 % in 74 general practitioners. Future work should explore the barriers to implementing this strategy in clinical practice.