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Is there a sense of complacency
around skin care?
C
onsidering that the skin is
often cited as the largest organ
in the body and has many
clever ways of keeping us safe —
from fighting off infection to keeping
all our other organs in roughly the
4
SKIN CARE TODAY
2015,Vol 1, No 1
SKIN CARE MATTERS
i
right place — it’s amazing that skin
care is still not always treated as a
healthcare priority.
It is eight years since the
Department of Health (DH)
recognised dermatology
as one of six specialties
it wanted to work with
‘to define clinically safe
pathways that provide the
right care in the right setting’,
to fulfil the requirements
of the White Paper,
Our
health, our care, our say: — a
new direction for community
services
(DH, 2006).
The themes of avoiding
unnecessary hospital
admissions (and associated
costs), promoting patient-
centred care and wellbeing
were developed further with
Delivering care closer to home
(DH, 2008) and the
NHS Next
Stage Review
(DH, 2008).
However, despite this
emphasis on ensuring that
patients with long-term
conditions receive the support
that they need to remain
independent at home, and
skin care being an indicator
that spans all five domains of
the
NHS Outcomes Framework
(DH, 2013), the notion
that management of skin
conditions is a‘Cinderella
specialty’, that access to
dermatology expertise is
subject to postcode lottery,
and that dermatological
conditions don’t kill, are
still concepts being
bandied around.
It could be said that there is
a sense of complacency around
managing skin conditions. This
is hard to balance against very
real statistics — 54% of the UK
population report a skin condition
