Skin cancer treatment on the spot

STACY SQUIRES/The Press

PROMPT ATTENTION: registrar Paul Martin operates on a patient's cancer lesion at the Burwood clinic.

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A new clinic to identify and remove skin cancer is open at Christchurch's Burwood Hospital, with expectations it will clear a backlog of 550 patients on the waiting list.

Stewart Sinclair, clinical director of the plastic surgery department at Christchurch Hospital, said the clinic, which took five years from planning to inception, had been devised in response to an "inefficient" public system.

"There is a huge number of skin lesions out there. A lot of them are cancer or pre-malignant, and the older people get, the more likely they are to grow a barnacle of some kind."

Traditionally, a general practitioner would refer a patient with a suspected malignant lesion if it was too "tricky" to remove at the practice or if the patient could not afford the operation.

The patient would then wait to be seen by a consultant and later be placed on a waiting list for the procedure to be completed in the public system, he said.

"It's just inefficient to have two queues, so we put this plan together to have a sort of a one-stop shop where we can see the patients and deal with them at the same time."

Stewart said the backlog of 550 people could be cleared in about six months.

At the Burwood clinic on Friday morning, Christchurch woman Delcie Grey, 87, had a lesion the size of a 50 cent coin removed from her lower right leg.

Grey said she had been on the waiting list for 12 months but had been seen and operated on within a half day at the new clinic.

- © Fairfax NZ News