One in five people in the UK will develop skin cancer in their lifetime. Melanoma incidence has more than doubled since the 1990s. And yet the dermatology pathway, which should be the mechanism for catching these cases early, is under extraordinary pressure.
Urgent suspected cancer (USC) referrals to dermatology have risen by 15% year on year. A significant proportion of those referrals don't result in a cancer diagnosis; they result in a relieved patient who could have been reassured weeks earlier, closer to home, without ever entering a hospital waiting room.
The scale of this inefficiency is not a clinical failure. It is a structural one.
General practitioners, without the specialist tools or training to distinguish between a benign seborrhoeic keratosis and an early melanoma, do the responsible thing: they refer. Every one of those referrals lands on an already overstretched secondary care system.
The Faster Diagnosis Standard requires 80% of patients to receive a definitive outcome within 28 days of an urgent referral. The NHS is not meeting that standard consistently. Waiting times in some areas extend well beyond it.
There is a better way. And community pharmacy, with its unique position as the most accessible part of the health system, is central to delivering it.
Map My Mole operates across two complementary models that can sit alongside each other in the same pharmacy.
The private mole check service allows pharmacies to offer patients a paid appointment, typically priced at £40–£60, generating meaningful additional revenue from day one.
The NHS-commissioned model, where an ICB or Trust contracts Map My Mole as part of its formal skin cancer triage pathway, provides a steady flow of paid referred cases, with additional revenue from image capture and independent prescribing — well above anything akin to Pharmacy First.
Both can run in parallel from the same device, the same team, and the same ten-minute appointment slot.
Map My Mole, developed by Community Dermatology and now operating across more than 1,600 sites in the UK, has built a teledermoscopy pathway that works from the community outward rather than the hospital inward.
The model is built around a simple but significant insight: the bottleneck in skin cancer triage is not the expertise of dermatologists. It is access to image capture of clinical quality at the point of patient concern.
At the point of referral or self-presentation, patients are offered a genuine choice.
Those who prefer convenience, or who might face physical or cultural barriers to attending in person, can opt for home capture. A Dyplens kit, a UKCA-marked Class I medical device that attaches to a smartphone, is dispatched within 48 hours. Guided by the app, the patient captures dermoscopic images of their own mole at home, in their own time.
For those who would rather be seen in person, community pharmacies provide an accessible, trusted alternative. A trained pharmacy team member conducts the appointment using the DE-300 smartphone-enabled dermatoscope, completing the image capture in around ten minutes. The pharmacy is on the high street and requires no GP appointment to access.
In both cases, images and clinical information are submitted securely through the Map My Mole app and reviewed by a UK-based consultant dermatologist. A clinical report is returned to the patient and their GP within 24 to 48 hours.
The data from Map My Mole's initial NHS contract, delivered with a large NHS Foundation Trust serving a predominantly rural and coastal population in northern England, is striking.
The Trust commissioned the service to deliver comprehensive triage for all GP urgent suspected cancer referrals entering the acute pathway. The service was mobilised in four days.
In the first three weeks:
The financial case is equally compelling. On a conservative figure of £150 per outpatient appointment avoided, the annualised saving from this single contract is estimated at £569,291, with 126 consultant days released per year for complex cases and long-wait cohorts.
These are not projections. They are outcomes achieved in a live NHS setting within weeks of go-live.
"We built Map My Mole because we kept seeing the same thing: patients waiting weeks for reassurance they could have had in days, while dermatology teams were consumed by benign cases that should never have reached them. Community pharmacy changes that equation completely. It puts clinical-grade assessment on the high street, where patients actually are."
— Toby Nelson, Co-founder, Community Dermatology
There is an important reason why community pharmacy specifically, rather than GP surgeries or standalone clinics, is such a natural fit for this pathway.
Pharmacies are visited far more frequently than any other healthcare setting. Patients who would not make a GP appointment for a mole they are vaguely worried about will walk into their local pharmacy for a repeat prescription. That proximity, and the trust that comes with it, creates an opportunity for earlier presentation that no other part of the system can replicate.
The Map My Mole model at pharmacy level requires no clinical staff. The image capture training takes hours, not weeks, and does not have to be performed by the pharmacist.
The Map My Mole platform handles clinical governance, consultant oversight, and patient follow-up, including calling patients up to three times to ensure they have received and understood their report.
For pharmacy teams, the service adds meaningful clinical value to their offering, generates a new revenue stream, and deepens the relationship with their community.
For the NHS, it shifts activity upstream and out of the hospital. For the patient, it means an answer within 24 to 48 hours rather than weeks.
"With Map My Mole partner pharmacies, patients in the community who are worried about their skin and don't know where to turn now can seek immediate help. The appointments are quick, the process is straightforward, and the turnaround from the consultant team is genuinely fast. Patients leave feeling cared for, not just processed. Being part of a clinical pathway that delivers real outcomes feels like exactly what pharmacy teams should be focusing on."
This model does not exist in a policy vacuum.
The NHS Neighbourhood Framework explicitly calls for cancer detection and triage to move into local communities. The National Cancer Plan for England, published in 2025, sets out ambitions to end outpatients as we know them by 2035, with straight-to-test pathways removing unnecessary clinic steps across the ten highest-volume specialties.
Dermatology, one of the most referral-heavy areas in the NHS, is a primary target for this kind of upstream shift.
Map My Mole is, by design, a straight-to-assessment pathway. It intercepts the moment of patient concern and provides a consultant-reviewed outcome without the patient needing to see a GP first or wait for a clinic appointment.
The model also directly addresses health inequalities. By removing the need to travel, by providing walk-in and extended-hours availability at pharmacies, and by supporting patients who cannot easily engage with digital platforms independently, Map My Mole reaches cohorts who are consistently underserved by the traditional pathway.
This aligns directly with Core20PLUS5 priorities and the access ambitions embedded in the NHS Long Term Plan.
There are currently 159 whole-time equivalent consultant dermatologist vacancies across the NHS in England, a shortage that has persisted for years and shows no sign of resolving at pace.
The pipeline of new consultants is not growing fast enough to meet rising demand.
Skin cancer incidence, meanwhile, has increased by more than 169% since the early 1990s, with a further 14% rise projected by 2040. The gap between the people who need specialist skin assessment and the specialists available to deliver it is widening, not closing.
The consequence is visible in waiting times. Research published in Annales de Dermatologie et de Venereologie found that the typical wait to see a hospital dermatologist in England runs to around ten months. NHS England's own data show that only 64% of patients are seen within the 18-week constitutional standard for dermatology, against a target of 92%.
In some areas, patients are waiting well over a year. For a patient with a mole that concerns them, that is not a wait. That is a period of sustained anxiety with no resolution in sight.
The idea that this problem will be solved by building more hospital capacity or training more consultants alone is, at this point, implausible. The workforce timelines simply do not match the pace of demand.
What can move faster is the infrastructure for assessment closer to home.
This is where community pharmacy becomes not just useful, but essential.
There are around 10,000 community pharmacies operating across England today. According to Lord Darzi's independent review of the NHS, more than 85% of people in England live within one mile of a community pharmacy, rising to close to 100% in the most deprived communities — the very communities where late-stage cancer diagnosis rates are highest, and where barriers to hospital attendance are greatest.
Pharmacies are open.
The case for community pharmacy's role in early cancer detection has never been stronger. The technology is here, the evidence is here, and the policy environment is moving decisively in this direction.
The question for pharmacy owners and groups is not whether this kind of service belongs in their setting. It is whether they want to be part of building the new standard of care and access — the future state of dermatology.
Green et al. (2021); Smith et al. (2021); Abdul Gafoor et al. (2024); NHS England Cancer Waiting Times Data Collection; National Cancer Plan for England (2025); GIRFT Dermatology Report; NHS Neighbourhood Framework (2025).