How to prepare for a skin check

Complete the medical history form

After you have booked your first appointment, please complete the Spot Check Clinic medical history form. We ask that you do this at least 24 hours before your appointment to give us adequate time to create your records and consider your skin cancer risk factors.

You can complete this form on your computer or phone and return it without printing it. If you prefer not to submit the form on your phone or computer, please arrive at least 20 minutes before your appointment so you have plenty of time to complete it without delaying your consultation.

Prepare your skin

We need to have the best possible visibility for examining and photographing your skin.

Please don’t wear make-up, fake tan or nail polish, and make sure your skin is clean.

If there are any particular spots you are concerned about, consider marking your skin nearby to make sure they aren’t missed during the examination.

If your spot of concern is in a hairy area, you may wish to shave around the spot a couple of days before your skin check. If you wish to wax or shave a large area of skin, this should be done at least a week before your skin check so that pimples, ingrown hairs and scabs have time to heal.

If you’ve had recent IPL or laser treatment to your skin, we recommend deferring your skin check for about a month as this treatment can change the colour of your moles.

If you have applied fake tan or spray tan recently, we suggest putting off your skin check for a few weeks. (We can still check your skin if you are wearing fake tan, but it tends to change the appearance of your spots when examined and photographed.

Dry skin can make spots harder to examine. If you do have very dry or flaky skin, we recommend that you moisturise daily — preferably for a week or so before your skin check.

If you have booked mole mapping (i.e., total body photography), you should wear plain-coloured underwear without a pattern.

Information to bring to your appointment

If you’ve had skin cancer previously, it’s very helpful if you bring a copy of the pathology result.

If you’ve had photos taken of your spots or body regions previously, we can rephotograph the spots or body areas for comparison. Ask your previous skin cancer clinic if they can provide these photos in electronic format. We can usually incorporate any previous photos into your medical record, allowing us to compare the spots we examine with the ones you’ve had photographed before.

Please note that if you have many previous photos, we may charge a fee for uploading them into your record and comparing them.