Education Initiatives

I have been sick with a nasty virus this week. Vomiting has been the order of the day....yuck :(

Because of this, I will keep this post extremely short but useful. The SACGHS meeting was held last month and I think it was huge. There are a lot of good webcasts that are a must watch.

The rate limiting step of personalized medicine is physician uptake, and the rate limiting step in uptake is education. The SACGHS meeting on the 20th of November was huge reviewing efforts and ideas for education

Overview of Session
Barbara Burns McGrath, R.N., Ph.D. Research Associate Professor at the University of Washington School of Nursing. She reviews nicely the outline for the day and gives us a guideline.

Please check out the lecture given by the National Coalition for Health Professional Education in Genetics Executive Director. He describes a database similar to the one we are working on.

In addition, we need to utilize physician extenders. The advantage of having nurses in genetics is the fact that they have had some education in medication dosages and medical conditions. The same applies for physician assistants in genetics. But they will never replace the counseling abilities of professionals who have trained for 2 years in the field of genetic counseling.

Elizabeth Pestka, M.S. Assistant Professor of Nursing at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine describes the 80 or so nursing organizations. It turns out 40 of those, 50% agreed to help include genetics into the nursing competencies. In 2006 there was a meeting to implement these competencies into practice.....This is where I sat back in awe. It is 2006 and they are just getting around to integrating these competencies? We are screwed for the next 4-5 years! But it turns out according to Nurse Pestka that these proceedings often take up to 17 years to become integrated!!!

I have worked with a nurse geneticist at Yale and I have to tell you how wonderful it is to share call with a nurse practitioner who is trained in genetics as well. I think we can really leverage our efforts with these talented individuals....I hope it doesn't take 17 years!

The Sherpa Says:
Now if we can only train genetics counselors in medicine!!!