Genomics in your Practice: a health and social care survey

The purpose of the Genomics in your Practice survey is to:

• assess if and how medics currently use genomics;
• measure self-perceived confidence in their genomics knowledge and skills;
• evaluate engagement with genomics education and training;
• understand their intention to use genomics in future practice; and
• identify future education and training requirements.

We also intend to:

• repeat the survey every 2-5 years to measure change.

Health Education England’s Genomics Education Programme is carrying this work out as part of fulfilling one of the commitments set out in Genome UK.

We are asking all practitioners with a medical degree, irrespective of level of experience or area of work, to complete the survey. This will enable us to gain a full picture of the medical workforce in relation to genomics.

Taking part in this study is completely voluntary. Choosing or declining to take part will not affect you in any way, other than the time taken to complete the survey.

The online survey will ask you a number of questions about you and your clinical role, focusing on your use, or not, of genomic testing. It will also ask you about your confidence in accessing genomic tests and using genomic information to inform your clinical practice. The survey finishes by asking some questions about how you access education and training information and what topic areas in genomics you would like to learn more about.

The survey will be available online until Friday 31 December 2021. It should take around 15-25 minutes to complete.

Individually, participating in the survey can help with your CPD planning.

The survey invites you to reflect on how you encounter genomics in your practice and consider your learning and development needs. You can use these reflections to inform your CPD choices, PDP and job planning – as highlighted in page 12 of the GMC guidance on CPD.

Following completion of the survey, we also provide respondents with a ‘genomics learning journey’ – a flexible way to chart your own course in building your knowledge of genomics medicine.

Collectively, the survey results will inform future education and training plans, helping to ensure that educational opportunities in genomics are better aligned to the medical community’s needs.

If you encounter any difficulties in accessing or completing the survey, please email the project team.

The information you provide will be kept confidential. The only people to see your all your responses will be the GEP team. Any information that could identify you as an individual will not be shared outside of the GEP. You will be asked if some of your information can be shared with local Education and Training Leads, but this is not a mandatory part of the survey and if you do not consent to this, then this information will not be shared.

The data will be kept securely in line with Health Education England’s privacy policy. Any reports written using the data may include some of your comments as quotes; however, you will remain anonymous.

By completing the survey, you give your consent for your responses to be collected, stored and analysed, and to be included in reports and other publications. Your information will be kept confidential and data will be presented so that individual respondents cannot be identified. Where there are small numbers of respondents from different specialisms or organisations, data will be combined so that it not possible to identify individuals in any reports, presentations or summaries.

You can withdraw from the survey at any time before clicking ‘Finish survey’ – just close the browser window.

If you wish for your responses to be deleted from the survey data after you have clicked “Finish survey”, please contact the GEP team. It will not be possible to withdraw your data from any analyses already conducted, or reports or publications already published, but once your data has been deleted it will not be available to be included in subsequent analyses.

This information will allow us to match survey responses from individuals over time, and so track changes in reported clinical activity and personal confidence. It will not be used to identify you and will be replaced by a unique pseudoanonymised identifier.

This information will allow us to match survey responses from individuals over time and track changes in reported clinical activity and self-perceived confidence in genomics knowledge and skills. It will not be used to identify you and will be replaced by a unique pseudo-anonymised identifier. Only the project team from the Genomics Education Programme will have access to the link between your GMC number and your pseudo-anonymised identifier.

This project has been assessed by the NHS Health Research Authority as not requiring their approval to be carried out. It has been approved by NHS HEE Information Governance.

We will be publishing a national report on the survey findings in early 2022.

The intention is to develop future iterations of the Genomics in your Practice workforce survey for other healthcare professional groups, such as nursing, midwifery and pharmacy.