In this episode, we speak to Dr Diarmuid Quinlan, a GP and MD candidate based at the Department of General Practice at University College Cork.

Title of paper: Competencies and clinical guidelines for managing acne with isotretinoin in general practice: a scoping review

Available at: https://doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2025.0135

There is evidence of inequitable access to the most effective treatment for severe acne, isotretinoin. This scoping review identified the clinical competencies to safely manage acne using isotretinoin. No global consensus exists among clinical practice guidelines (CGPs) on whether GPs are appropriate prescribers of isotretinoin. Appropriately resourced and CPG-guided patient access to isotretinoin in primary care may promote safe, timely, and equitable acne management for patients and improve antimicrobial stewardship.

Transcript:

This transcript was generated using AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Please be aware it may contain errors or omissions.

Speaker A

00:00:01.440 - 00:01:07.850

Hello and welcome to BJGP Interviews. My name is Nada Khan and I'm one of the associate editors of the bjgp. And welcome to our autumn edition of the BJGP podcast.

We're kicking off with a new set of interviews for the next few months. So thanks again for joining us.

Today we're speaking to Dr. Dermod Quinlan, who is a practicing GP in Cork and is also an MD candidate at University College Cork in Ireland.

We're here today to discuss his paper, recently published in the BJGP titled Competency and Clinical Guidelines for Managing Acne with Isotretinoin in General Practice. A Scoping Review. So thanks very much, Dermid, for joining me here today to talk about this paper.

But yeah, I guess I just wanted to start by saying that this is a really interesting paper and I think it covers a very common condition that we see in general practice and covers treatment, which can be quite difficult as well for acne.

But I wonder if you could just start by telling us a little bit about why you wanted to do this research and just a bit about the treatment of it and why you focused down on this topic, really.

Speaker B

00:01:09.610 - 00:02:59.510

So lovely to meet you, Nada. I'm first and foremost a GP and I see patients three days a week, 20 hours a week.

And I did a diploma in dermatology over a decade ago and I still do some online tutoring. So I have a long standing interest in dermatology and have an extended role in dermatology.

I work in an urban practice with lots of young teenagers and young people in it.

Acne is a common chronic disorder and I would see a lot of young people with acne of all grades of severity, mild, moderate and severe, and very severe. And as a clinician, very clearly recognize that behind acne is a patient very commonly suffering profound distress.

And we know that the morbidity associated with acne and particularly severe acne, is very extensive.

There's the emotional morbidity, there's psychological morbidity, it impacts people's employment opportunities, their education achievements, and then more widely, because treating acne is resource intensive, it has an impact on the healthcare workforce. And then there are concerns about the very prolonged use of antibiotics in acne, raising real antimicrobial stewardship concerns.

So I have an interest in this. And then we decided that we would do research into it because we don't know the clinical competencies for safe use of isotretinoin.

So I was particularly interested in severe acne and the management of severe acne, and also it didn't clearly...