title: A Systematic Review of Training to Improve Melanoma Diagnostic Skills in General Practitioners.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Camperdown, NSW, 2050, Australia. alvin_chia74@yahoo.com.au.
authors.forename: Alvin
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chia
authors.affiliation: School of Public Health, Sydney Medical School, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia.
authors.forename: Lyndal
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Trevena
mesh_terms: D058005:General Practitioners / Q000592:standards*; D006293:Health Promotion / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D008545:Melanoma / Q000175:diagnosis*; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care; D010818:Practice Patterns, Physicians' / Q000592:standards*
keywords: Diagnosis; General practitioners; Melanoma