Regionally based primary care nurses in South Australia will be upskilled to conduct skin cancer screenings as part of the state’s first nurse led AI-assisted triage service.
Following the success of a pilot program last year, supported by a $125,000 grant from The Hospital Research Foundation Group, the University of South Australia has introduced a nine-week training course for regional nurses to expand their scope of practice.
Nurses will be taught how to identify suspicious lesions using a handheld imaging device (dermatoscpe), with the images scanned by an AI program against an online database to determine if it needs further investigation by a Nurse Practitioner, GP or dermatologist.
Professor Marion Eckert, who led the project, said the training would support nurses working in isolated locations to refer patients to nurse practitioners or doctors for further investigation and treatment.
“We have partnered with medtech company, MetaOptima, to utilise their dermatology software to take images of skin lesions,” Prof Eckert said.
“Once our nurses identify a suspicious lesion, they take a photo and the AI then analyses the image against its rich database, providing an innovative educational resource.
“By using this technology in our training program, UniSA has launched regional South Australia’s first AI-based triage and decision-support model for nurses and GPs.”
The training program has been born out of Project Check Mate, a collaboration between THRFG, the Rosemary Bryant AO Research Centre at UniSA, Skin Check Champions, Skin Smart Australia and more recently SA Health’s Preventive Health SA.
The program aimed to increase the early detection of skin cancer in regional areas, where rates are up to 31% higher, through a series of pop-up screening clinics.
Prof Eckert said from almost 1000 screenings, more than 200 suspicious lesions were detected.
Project Check Mate has received significant attention from the community, with BHP adopting the model to upskill its own on-site nurses at Carrapateena mine and SA Prison Health Services.
BHP’s Carrapateena Superintendent of Health & Emergency Services, Raf Sciezka, said Project Check Mate has already “paid dividends”, with eight workers identified as having high risk lesions.
“Previously, we’d run concentrated skin check ‘campaigns’ and we’d miss people because of their rosters but now our nurses can incorporate skin checks into our standard on-site health appointments,” he said.
