A man successfully operated on for skin cancer just four weeks after he went to the GP to have a mole checked says being part of a pilot to speed up treatment time was “the best thing ever”.<\/p>\n
Richard Alun Jones from Stourbridge had recently retired from his position at Jaguar Land Rover when his partner noticed changes to a mole on his back.<\/p>\n
He had the operation to remove it as part of a new nurse-led pathway at Dudley’s Russells Hall Hospital on his 61st birthday last August and was later told it was melanoma.<\/p>\n
“It was the best birthday present. Just get rid of it,” he said. “Thankfully they captured it. They got it.”<\/p>\n
The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust’s direct-to-surgery pathway aims to take patients from a telephone consultation with a nurse to surgery within the same week, removing the need for a face-to-face consultant appointment.<\/p>\n
It was developed by lead cancer nurse Lucy Smith to ensure those with suspected cancer could be assessed, biopsied and treated sooner.<\/p>\n
She explained all patients went through the trust’s well-established teledermatology triage system, with consultant dermatologists assessing their images online.<\/p>\n
“We can then streamline patients into the best pathway for them,” she said, adding patient choice was “paramount”.<\/p>\n
“There will be complex patients that need to see a consultant.<\/p>\n
“But there are patients that can come through a nurse-led route that are simple excisions that we know need to come off and time is of the essence.”<\/p>\n
A four-month pilot from June to October last year supervised by a plastic surgeon and dermatologist treated 80 patients, 70% of whom were found to have skin cancer, pre-cancerous changes or an abnormal mole.<\/p>\n
The service now sees about 40 to 50 patients a month, the trust said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man successfully operated on for skin cancer just four weeks after he went to the GP to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":764907,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-764906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=764906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/764907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=764906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=764906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=764906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}