About 245,000 skin cancer procedures, more than $43 million in taxpayer money, and one in three participants with a non-melanoma cancer cut out. That is what a QIMR Berghofer study turned up after it tracked more than 40,000 Queenslanders for eight years.
All of them were aged 40 to 69 and enrolled in QSkin, billed as the world’s largest study into skin cancer. Researchers looked at their use of skin cancer services through the Medical Benefits Schedule, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and Queensland hospital admission data.
Here is what it means in plain terms. Seventy per cent of the group used at least one skin cancer service. Half had a skin biopsy. Thirty-four per cent had a mole or spot taken off to rule out melanoma, five per cent had a melanoma excised, and eight per cent went into hospital for treatment.
Scaled up to the two million Queenslanders aged 40 to 69 in 2025, the researchers estimate about 1.49 million procedures a year. They say that costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Skin cancer accounted for about 2.4 per cent of all direct healthcare costs for the participants.
Who uses the services most
The heaviest users were more likely to be older, male, privately insured and less educated than people who used none. The findings were published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health. Cancer Council Queensland worked on the study alongside QIMR Berghofer.
Prevention, and the tanning problem
Lead author Daniel Lindsay, an economist with Cancer Council Queensland, said prevention campaigns are the most cost-effective way to lower the cost to the health system. “We know what the main risk factor is for skin cancer, it’s being exposed to the sun, and that can be prevented,” he said.
He worries about what young people are watching. “We’re seeing TikTok influencers who are starting to promote tanning as a good thing,” Dr Lindsay said. His concern is that more sun exposure and riskier behaviour will lead to more skin cancers in Australia down the track.
Senior author David Whiteman called the results a “wake-up call”. He wants more targeted prevention campaigns, and he is frank about the difficulty. “Skin cancer prevention has never been easy,” he said. Each generation needs new tactics, and the media landscape is now far more fragmented. Campaigns, he said, need to reach people who do not speak English as a first language, people in remote and outback communities, and people in offices.
Sun at the edges of the day
A second QIMR Berghofer study, led by Rachel Neale, was released at the same time. Researchers exposed the lower backs of 55 healthy adults to ultraviolet rays over four days. The doses were too low to make the skin pink, yet even the lower ones caused measurable DNA damage.
The finding cuts against the long-held view that early morning or late afternoon sun is harmless. Professor Whiteman said people can get “lulled into a sense of security” when sunlight is weak and stay out too long without protection. His takeaway is to treat sunscreen as a daily habit, even for short, unplanned spells outdoors.
Vinod Gopalan, a molecular cancer pathologist at Griffith University, called it a good study for teaching people to wear sunscreen. He added that it “has only got 55 participants” and that larger, more diverse studies are needed. Of the cost study, he said it did not look at melanoma alone: “Non-melanoma skin cancers are much higher in number.”
