SPOTS Home Page
Who are we?
Sun Protection Outreach Teaching by Students (SPOTS) was created by a group of medical students and dermatology faculty from both St. Louis University and Washington University Medical Schools under the leadership of Stephanie Lickerman, RN, Community Education Director for the Melanoma Hope Network. This program, established through a collaborative effort between the two medical institutions, a community non-profit organization (the Melanoma Hope Network), and the Rockwood School District, represents the first educational program of its kind that focuses on teenage skin cancer prevention taught by medical professionals in training.
This comprehensive program aims to teach adolescent students early detection and prevention measures in an effort to decrease the rising rate of skin cancer, to gain information as to what sun protective measures the students currently use, to discover teenage attitudes and behaviors towards sun protection and to delineate effective teaching methods for medical professionals to use in their effort to change poor sun protection behaviors.
Program Goals
- Educate adolescent students about early detection and prevention of skin cancer.
- Discover what sun-protective methods teens currently use and promote change from non-sun-protective behaviors to sun protective behaviors.
- Identify teenage attitudes and behaviors towards sun protection.
- To obtain and evaluate students’ sun-exposure history, family skin cancer history, and demographic information in relation to students’ knowledge, attitudes, intentions to engage in sun-protective behaviors, and current use of sun-protective measures.
- Promote outreach education in the community by students training in the medical field (physicians, nurses, physician assistants, public health).
Interested in starting SPOTS at your school?
The entire SPOTS program was designed to be run independently at medical and nursing schools across the country. The teaching manual is available as a pdf along with games and extra material to help the student-teachers prepare for their classroom experience.
