As genetics increasingly becomes integrated into all areas of health care and the use of complex genetic tests continues to grow, the clinical genetics workforce likely will face greatly increased demand for its services. Genetic testing in clinical settings has increased significantly over the past 10 years. The trend has been driven in part by the rapid decline in the cost of sequencing and been accompanied by the advent of clinical genome-wide sequencing (GWS). Consequently, demand for counseling and consultations with clinical genetics professionals has grown rapidly, resulting in concerns about potential workforce shortages and insufficient health system capacity to meet this growing demand. As a means of informing strategic planning by health-care systems to prepare to meet this future demand, the results of a scoping review of the genetics workforce in high-income countries, summarizing all available evidence on its composition and capacity published between 2010 and 2019, are reported in the September 2020 issue of the journal Genetics in Medicine.
The evidence presented includes the composition and size of the workforce; the scope of practice for genetics and non-genetics specialists; the time required to perform genetics-related tasks; caseloads of genetics providers; and opportunities to increase efficiency and capacity. Allied health care providers, along with nurses and pharmacists are considered to be among non-genetics specialists. Presently, there is a shortage of genetics providers and a lack of consensus about the appropriate boundaries between the scopes of practice for genetics and non-genetics personnel. A concern is that continued growth in the clinical implementation of GWS is likely to add further pressure on this segment of the health workforce because it requires more intensive decisional support for both patients and health-care practitioners than for less comprehensive genetic tests. Reasons why include the possibility of secondary findings, privacy concerns, difficulty in interpreting test results, and the need to support patients faced with the complex and often unanticipated psychological and informational impacts of genomic testing.
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