Dr. Laura Durcan:

They are really worried people and they should be seen very quickly and within a month. If a GP thinks a person has a melanoma then he or she should be straight in. We have a huge cohort of patients who are lesion query cancer. The second cohort of patients that are not being seen are the people with what I would call routine cases, but which are still horribly life changing conditions such as psoriasis, eczema and so on. Those kinds of chronic conditions also need to be seen in the dermatology clinic, but they are on the other side of the waiting list.

In addition to that we have the responsibility to patients. If a person is a patient of one of those people who have left, and if the patient is, for example, on a biological therapy for severe skin disease, or possibly on methotrexate - a form of chemo - for a severe skin disease, that person then has nobody to follow his or her progress over time.