Improving Genetics Education in Graduate and Continuing Health Professional Education: Workshop Summary by Adam C. Berger

Author:Adam C. Berger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: The National Academies Press
Published: 2015-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

DISSEMINATING GENETICS AND GENOMICS EDUCATION INTO PRACTICE

Graduate students can occasionally leap ahead of the faculty with their assimilation of knowledge of genetics and genomics, one workshop participant said. Three years ago the participant’s institute started offering medical students the option of concurrently enrolling in a master’s degree program in genomic medicine. The institution anticipates that medical school graduates with this additional degree will end up being an educational resource for the practices that they are entering.

Weiss said that “there is a real excitement to teaching the learners and getting them as an inoculum there to make change.” However, as an isolated strategy, it might carry higher risk. When residents have received quality improvement training, but then move to practices that are unsupportive of this type of approach, the enthusiasm and engagement of that trainee can “just die on the vine,” Weiss said. “That is a very painful thing to watch.” Faculty need to plan for that potential circumstance, Weiss said, to keep young learners’ engagement in quality improvement or genomics going. He also suggested that one strategy for spreading genomics knowledge into residency programs might be to encourage collaboration between faculty and residents on experiential projects.

Bruce Blumberg said that at Kaiser Permanente a similar issue arose related to efforts to provide medical residents with education about quality improvement. “We are learning pretty rapidly that we have faculty that don’t know very much about quality improvement,” he said. “Whenever a new body of knowledge comes into a field, you have that problem—where the learners and the people recently coming out of training have a skill or a body of knowledge that doesn’t necessarily exist throughout the faculty.”

Given such obstacles, implementing a genomics education component for currently practicing physicians is a grand challenge. One participant, for example, described how medical students at his institution could take an elective course in personalized medicine and genomes that offered them (and interested faculty) the chance to analyze either their own pharmacogenomics data or data from an anonymous person; then throughout their second year the students are taught how that genetic information could be useful in clinical practice. However, the faculty in charge are not entirely comfortable with the genetics material themselves, the participant said, and thus when students enter their third, fourth, and residency years, the follow-through on this earlier learning is lost.

Assessment is a chief driver of learning, and at times a new body of information must enter a field of practice. The critical challenge, Lipner said, is determining which persuasive sources to trust in terms of which new information is critical to assimilate.

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1See http://www.fda.gov/drugs/scienceresearch/researchareas/pharmacogenetics/ucm083378.htm (accessed November 12, 2014).

2Data derived from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. See http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes291051.htm (accessed January 16, 2015).

3See https://www.natmatch.com/ashprmp/stats/2013applstats.html (accessed January 16, 2015).

4See http://www.g-2-c-2.org/index.php (accessed November 13, 2014).

5See http://assessment2020.abim.org (accessed November 12, 2014).

6Additional resources on case studies in genetics and genomics can be found at: http://g-3-c.org/en (accessed January 16, 2015).

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