Our regional Genomic Medicine Service has announced the establishment of 14 new Communities of Practice (CoPs) which will bring healthcare professionals from across the region together on a regular basis to share best practice and upskill around genomics and how it relates to their particular area of medicine.
The online Communities of Practice (CoPs), which will be supported by the East Genomic Medicine Service Alliance (GMSA), will run monthly and are open to any healthcare professional working in the East Midlands or East of England. Typically, they will last between 1 and 2 hours, and feature expert speakers and practical advice.
The NHS in England has established a Genomic Medicine Service, with genetic and genomic testing available for rare disease diagnosis, tumour profiling, and pharmacogenetics for all in the population who meet eligibility criteria. There is a focus on equity of access to testing for the country’s diverse population of 55 million, yet there are only a few hundred clinical geneticists and genetic counsellors within the country to support the service. Delivering the Genomic Medicine Service with equity, therefore, requires the embedding of genomics throughout the health service - from primary and community care to specialist and tertiary care.
A scalable solution to supporting clinicians
In our region, East GMSA have found the Community of Practice model to be highly effective solution to this workforce challenge.
Dr Gemma Chandratillake, Education and Training Lead for NHS East GMSA, explains: “We have found that a Community of Practice model is a scalable, systematic way to approach genomics education and training provision for healthcare professionals. This format enables those with genomics expertise to support large numbers of mainstream clinicians across a large geographical region, thereby increasing the reach of their practice”.
The effectiveness of the Community of Practice model has been demonstrated over the past 3 years by the East Paediatric Genomics Forum. Via monthly online meetings and a digital support platform, the Forum has engaged over 600 Paediatricians, and supported over 100 from around 30 NHS organisations to implement trio whole genome sequencing into their practice. That the Forum has helped to implement this complex test within mainstream care pathways provides strong evidence of the effectiveness of the Community of Practice approach.
Dr Chandratillake continues:
Having assessed this model to be an effective intervention to engage and upskill mainstream clinicians across the East Genomics geography, we are now supporting clinical leaders to expand the provision of pan-regional CoPs to many other areas of medicine.
Dr Gemma Chandratillake, Education and Training Lead, NHS East GMSA
The new Genomics Community of Practices will be funded up until March 2026, and cover a wide range of medical specialisms across cancers and rare and inherited disease.
Professor Dick Sandford, Clinical Director for East GMSA, said of the applications: “We were delighted to receive so many responses to our call to fund new genomics communities of practice. From a very good long list of 25 applications from 8 NHS Trusts within our region, we had the hugely difficult task of whittling these down to the 14 new Communities of Practice we are announcing today”.
“I would like to thank everyone who responded to our call by submitting an application, and my message to anyone unsuccessful in this first wave would be that we hope to be able to announce further waves of funding from next year”.
The new Communities of Practice will focus on the application of genomic medicine in many areas of cancer including:
- Lung Cancer
- Gynaecological Oncology
- Haemato-oncology
- Pancreatic cancer
- Urology.
In terms of rare and inherited conditions among those funded are CoPs for:
- Cardiology
- Endocrine Neoplasia
- Familial Hypercholesterolaemia
- Immunology
- Monogenic Diabetes
- Ophthalmology
- Paediatric endocrinology.
Dr Chandratillake will be presenting on the CoP model at the World Congress on Genetic Counselling, 24th – 26th February 2025. Her talk, entitled Communities of Practice: Developing capability across the multiprofessional workforce to implement genomic medicine at scale will make the case for Genomics Communities of Practice as a highly effective model for engaging and upskilling mainstream clinicians across numerous NHS Trusts across a large geographical area.
How to get involved
To find out more about each of the new East Genomics Communities of Practice, including who is leading them, when meetings are taking place, and how to join, please see our CoP web pages here.