Following publication of the 2003 genetics white paper, "Our inheritance, our future - realising the potential of genetics in the NHS", the Department of Health funded 10 service development projects across England to develop innovative models of integrating genetics into 'mainstream medicine'. The projects developed and piloted different models of services in different specialties and covered a range of genetic conditions. The NHS National Genetics Education and Development Centre had a key role to support the projects, and to disseminate the learning from the projects to the wider NHS.
The Toolkit was developed by collating experiences from these pilot service development projects. NHS National Genetics Education and Development Centre staff held a workshop with pilot project staff in November 2006 to identify key challenges faced in developing their services and to highlight factors for success and significant barriers. Further information was collected through a questionnaire based on these identified areas. In addition, Centre staff analysed key themes from project reports and other documents and the pilot projects contributed resources they had developed or used.
We would like to thank all the projects for their contributions to this Toolkit.
The service development projects developed and piloted different models of genetics services in mainstream medicine and covered a range of genetic conditions. There were three common themes across projects:
The pilot projects developed services covering a wide range of genetic conditions, including:
Further information about the pilot projects is available.
Last updated: 13 October 2011
