Raising awareness about sun protection is an ongoing challenge. In 2018, a Survey Monkey questionnaire was distributed among healthcare professionals in the United Kingdom looking at their own habits of sunscreen usage. A total of 165 responses were collected. Eighty-nine percent of our respondents would use sunscreen when outdoors 11am-3pm on a cloudless, sunny day in August in the UK. However, only 27% of these healthcare professionals would regularly reapply sunscreen every 2 hours. The most important reason for using sunscreen was avoiding sunburn (importance weighted average of 4.71, on a scale from 1 to 5), followed by avoiding skin cancer (4.49) and skin ageing (4.06). On an importance scale from 1 to 5, the most important sunscreen characteristics, when choosing or recommending a product, were the level of UVA protection (importance weighted average 4.48), its stickiness (3.85) and degree of water-resistance (3.77).
Keywords: cancer; photodermatology; ultraviolet radiation.
© 2023 Petrou et al.