Starting my Psoriasis Outpatient Clinic

I am a Professor of Dermatology in Ain Shams University Cairo Egypt.

We have a very busy general dermatology outpatient clinic that receives patients 6 days a week. We also have a phototherapy unit, which treats patients from all over Egypt.

With the encouragement of Professor Dubertret and Professor El Gamal and in accordance with our understanding of the importance of the problem of Psoriasis in Egypt, I decided to set up the clinic.

We started around a month ago, I have a junior colleague who helps me with seeing the patients. The clinic is once a week on a Thursday morning, we see patients mostly referred from our outpatient clinic or our phototherapy unit. We have detailed files for all our patients including very careful history and detailed dermatological examination including the body surface area (BSA). Patients are photographed and details of their previous therapies are recorded. Complete work up is performed for each patient to determine the safety of therapy and any other concomitant medical conditions. Patients are photographed for follow up. So far we saw around 15 patients of various types of psoriasis including erythrodermic and pustular. A couple of patients had to be admitted as inpatients for more careful follow up.

I am very happy to have finally got all the necessary approvals to start this clinic and I need to start finding means to fund the clinic to be able to help as much cases as I can specifically regarding biologic therapy which is quite expensive and unaffordable on the long run for most of our patients.

Psoriasis is very common in Egypt and it represents a major psychosocial problem besides being a serious medical problem in some of the cases, patients are stigmatized and have a lot of problems which impact their quality of life.

Further along I would like to advertise our clinic to bring in as much patients as I can so I will be able to help in every possible way regarding early detection of any comorbidities and helping with the appropriate treatment.

More patients will allow for better follow up specifically studying the different response to all the different modalities of treatment, also epidemiological studies will be very easy to perform.

It’s still early and I will keep you updated about our clinic.