Counseling Our Patients on Sun Protection: How Are We Doing? :

There is probably not a health care professional in practice who is not aware of the importance of recommending sun protection to reduce the risk of patients developing skin cancer. As pediatricians, we are likely to do this at least in the summer, or are we? Balk et al. (10.1542/peds.2017-1680) decided to examine how American Academy of Pediatrics primary care pediatricians are doing in regard to their sun protection counseling (as part of a survey on preventive counseling topics) and share the results of their survey in a study being early released this week.  The authors compared survey results obtained in 2002 with ones obtained in 2015 (adding questions about indoor tanning in the latter survey).  While the good news is that more pediatricians report discussing sun protection with the majority of their patients in 2015, (34% versus 23%), the vast majority of pediatricians still are not actively counseling.  In addition, variations exist geographically in this country as to how often sun protection counseling is done in an office visit. Indoor tanning in particular is only discussed at least once by half those surveyed and almost ¾ of the respondents were unaware of whether their state had a law regarding minors being allowed to do indoor tanning (and when they did know, they counseled more about this).  You can guess that when asked why not counsel more teens about this, the number one answer was time.  We hope you can take some time to read this study and then think about ways you and your staff can do even more to promote sun protection if not during the visit, through posters, online or text reminders, or other methods that work for you and the community you serve.  In addition, just because it’s getting cold in many parts of the country, the sun still shines and indoor tanning centers are open—so while sun protection strategies may not be burning in your mind during a health maintenance visit, the sun keeps burning our patients even on cold days when our patients are outside—making sun protection a topic that will hopefully heat up among the prevention issues you discuss with your patients.