How the nurse-melanographer model is reshaping skin cancer care

and what that actually looks like inside a clinic i'm joined by lynette hooper an experienced melanographer who's worked closely with gps in skin cancer clinics lynette thanks for joining me thank you yeah thank you first question i suppose is how did you get into this space of being a melanographer

it's a rather long story through a long career span matt basically i started up a skin clinic, a beauty clinic years ago.

So I studied beauty therapy, but that was back in the 90s.

And I found that working in that area, I was looking at people's skin a lot and I would pick up things on my clients at the time.

So there might be a little bit of a lump on an eye or something that looked a little bit unusual.

So I would just say, look, you must go and get that checked.

And so moving along from there, I always maintained a strong interest in skin.

I moved into different professions, different areas.

So I've worked in pharma, I've worked in pathology.

I now work for a large health corporation who are involved in dermoscopy equipment, digital imaging equipment.

And I started a career with that company, basically training doctors on how to use different devices and equipment.

an opening we saw an opportunity to open a skin clinic because a lot of people wait months and months to see a specialist or to see a GP sometimes they're waiting in the waiting room and the GP's looking after all sorts of things he's looking after headaches sore toes mental health issues and getting in to see a doctor for a skin check oftentimes the doctor is quite busy and doesn't have enough time to do proper skin checks.

So that's why we opened up individual skin clinics just specializing in checking the skin cancers.

You've moved from, I suppose, an operational or business development role within skin cancer into a clinical role.

What really motivated you to become a clinician? I suppose as an operations person, I'm not a clinician and it's sort of quite foreign to me to think that I would become a clinician at some stage in the future.

You're one of the unique people I know in this industry have actually been on both sides of the fence.

What took you into the clinical side of it?

I think it was more the interest.

I mean, I'm basically a people person.

It was more my background in skin and my interest in skin and knowing how to use the equipment as well.

Well, I had to have a lot of training, obviously, to do that.

But it was basically the opportunity that I saw.

And having worked also with skin cancer specialists, GPs in that device field,

Was this something you decided to do a long time ago, or is this more? How long have you been working on the clinical side of this industry?

On the clinical side of this industry, only really five, six years.