The societal impact of primary and secondary skin cancer prevention campaigns continues to increase. Alert to the dangers of excessive sun exposure and its role as a risk factor for skin cancer, the population has also gradually come to understand the importance of early diagnosis. Greater awareness among the general population and primary care physicians has increased the number of referrals to dermatology.

Data from the DIADERM registry1 show that about 32% of referrals from primary care to dermatology in the Spanish public health care system cite a benign skin lesion as the main problem2 and such referrals may therefore be avoidable.

This observation is of major interest for planning the delivery of care by dermatology services, whose managers must ensure that potentially serious dermatologic problems do not compete for attention with benign conditions that pose no health risk to patients. For this reason dermatology services should direct their efforts not so much to “avoiding” consultations for benign conditions but rather to providing ways to guarantee that any patient with such lesions or conditions can access a dermatologist's opinion without having a negative impact on the early treatment of serious skin diseases.

Appropriate training of the family practitioners and pediatricians at the primary care level and the implementation of teledermatology referrals3 are approaches that help dermatology services deliver appropriate care to resolve each patient's true needs.