Most young people furnishing their first home would opt for a comfortable sofa. However, Gemma Waddel installed a sun bed. After years of using tanning salons, she relished the prospect of baking for as long as she liked beneath the ultraviolet rays in her flat.

Now, as she applies factor 50 sun block before venturing outside in any weather, Waddel, 24, is appalled by her foolishness. Two years ago an innocuous-looking mole on her leg was found to be cancerous. Once it had been excised, doctors removed lymph nodes from her groin where they thought the cancer might have spread.

She was lucky. It had not spread but chronic abuse of sun beds has left her scarred and vulnerable to the fastest-growing form of the disease in Scotland.

The nursery nurse from Armadale, West Lothian, was saved from a potentially worse prognosis because she went to her GP after spotting a mole on her leg. The doctor referred her to a dermatologist who said the first mole was benign but raised concerns about a smaller one on her knee.

“To me it just looked like a small black mark, but I was not aware of what a melanoma was supposed to look like,” she says. “I found out that doctors are more concerned about flat moles than raised ones because they are growing into your skin. My mole was growing inwards.”

With rates of skin cancer in Scotland 11% higher than those in the rest of the UK, doctors are urging greater vigilance. Mole clinics — drop-in centres where patients have their skin checked — are a popular method of detecting the disease in its earliest stages. But at last week’s British Association of Dermatologists’ conference, plans for delegates to offer free mole checks were scrapped after NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde claimed it would put too much pressure on the health service.

The move follows attempts by the skin cancer charity Melanoma Action and Support Scotland (MASS) to set up mobile clinics that had to be abandoned because of a lack of NHS support. Previous clinics held around the UK have proven successful. One run by the charity Skcin at the Chelsea Flower Show in London detected 17 cases of skin cancer. Skin Care Campaign Scotland is inviting MSPs and parliamentary staff to have a mole check at an education event in Holyrood in November.

A spokesman for the health board in Glasgow said its decision not to allow the mole clinic was based on lack of notice and that patients referred by their GPs would remain the priority for dermatologists. However, there are concerns that if large numbers of people come forward with suspicious moles requiring further investigation, overstretched dermatology departments would not be able to cope.

So, has the public awareness programme become a victim of its own success with too many patients and not enough resources? Leigh Smith, the chairwoman of MASS and Skin Care Campaign Scotland, believes more work is needed. “We still need a big public education campaign to warn Scots not to get sunburned, to stay in the shade and to wear covering clothing,” she says.

“We also need more dermatologists, more dermatology provision and more training for GPs so that they can spot skin cancer too.”

In recent years there has been a 43% rise in the number of men with melanomas and a 20% increase in the number of women who have them. “If removed early, thin melanoma is curable, but left too long it may become thicker and more difficult to remove and it can spread to other parts of the body,” Smith says.

But as Waddel points out, some people are reluctant to go to the bother of arranging an appointment with their GP over something as seemingly trivial as a mole. “That’s why I think mole clinics are very important,” she says. “I know the NHS works on a tight budget but we are talking about people’s lives. Spotting a mole early can save lives and there should be more medical staff trained to cope with the increased demand.”

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