This year’s conference will be unlike any before as we host our first-ever virtual conference. Though we’ll be more distant geographically, you’ll find that NSGC’s 2020 conference presents many opportunities to connect and to do so in novel and exciting ways.
Following our theme of “Raising our Voices, Showing our Strength,” I encourage you to continue to bring your voice and your strengths to the table - your intellectual, compassionate and emotional strengths - just as you have throughout this year and to conferences in years past.
It’s a record-breaking year for the scope of our conference—this is the most continuing education units NSGC has ever offered at a conference. Opportunities to learn and grow from this content abound.
In addition to having a lot of content to learn from, I hope you’ll all have a chance to add your voice to the conversation. Increasingly, this meeting is a critical center of community and thought-leadership in genetic counseling. It’s a space to have important conversations about how to best care for the individuals and families seeking our services and about the future we hope to create for them and for our profession.
Lessons learned from COVID-19
As we continue to articulate the value we provide throughout the healthcare system, we articulate a path forward for the profession. I hope this meeting provides an opportunity for us to focus on this path, to look across the country at what our fellow genetic counselors are doing and think about what’s next.
The COVID-19 pandemic has both created opportunities for our profession and worsened pre-existing barriers. For years now, we’ve been studying, testing and implementing models of telehealth to improve access to care, with more data to support our practice delivered by telehealth than many other professions. When the pandemic began, many clinics were ready and able to move to telehealth-- a model that is preferred by patients, increases their safety and limits exposure of clinic staff. Unfortunately, for many who are dependent upon “incident to” and facility fee billing models, the move to telehealth exacerbated the pre-existing billing barriers, many of which were related to the need for CMS to recognize genetic counselors as providers.
Throughout this year’s meeting, let’s applaud those who have been able to shift their practice models overnight and also those who’ve been leading telemedicine efforts prior to the pandemic who have given us examples to look to. Let’s study their experiences and let’s think together about these models for the future - how to best deliver them and how to advocate for their value to patients. Doing so is critical if we want to enable a future where patients have access to the services they need.
Advocating for diversity and inclusion as clinicians and counselors
With the backdrop of massive disparities among those impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner and far too many others brought forward a national conversation on systemic racism and social injustice that brought both added urgency to our own initiatives to address diversity, equity and inclusion and raised questions about what our role, as an organization, is in the national conversation.
We need to both make meaningful progress to celebrate and expand diversity within our own community and also advocate for such activities more broadly in the communities around us. We are working to identify and define inequities within our profession and develop policies and practices to bring about equity for both providers and patients. We need to promote inclusion of diverse voices, perspectives and viewpoints to create a broader vision for the future, so that we are more prepared to serve a broader population of people. Listen for this throughout the sessions; listen for the ideas that will help guide our path forward. Regarding diversity, equity and inclusion in our own profession, attendees will hear an update from the Exeter group, a health-equity consulting firm that’s conducting a deep-dive analysis of NSGC and the profession with an intention to guide a strategy that will lead us forward. We will use the data they gather to make strategic decisions about what we can implement impactfully in the short term and where to set our sights in the long term.
Communicate, Participate, Connect: Make the 2020 conference your own
This conference also aims to support your own professional development. There is excellent scientific and clinical content for you to take back to your practice and there will be opportunities to build new skills in supervision, research, career planning and leadership. As you build those skills, you strengthen our community as a whole and improve our ability to provide valuable, innovative services to our clients. You make the case for our federal bill all the more obvious to everyone around us. You help secure the future vision of a vibrant, profession integrated in diverse roles across the health care system, improving access to high-quality genetics and genomic services for all.
This meeting is calling our community to build strength. We draw on our common desire to connect genetic innovation to the individuals and families who can benefit from it, the individuals who we can help overcome the unthinkable realities of human biology to come to a place of their own strength, to find their own voices. And as we help them build strength, we also grow from that strength.
So, lean in to that computer screen, lean in to the chat boxes, engage with the people who move you, who inspire you, who challenge you. We have a lot of big conversations to have and a whole lot of innovative, thoughtful people with whom we can have them.
With gratitude,
Gillian Hooker
Gillian Hooker
Applying her background in molecular and clinical genetics, genetic counseling and behavioral science, Gillian is committed to overcoming the barriers to effective translation of genome science at the patient, provider and system levels. As a researcher in academic and government settings, Gillian has worked with numerous transdisciplinary teams on the front lines of genomics, developing and evaluating methods for delivering genomic information to patients and their providers. Having served as the associate director of a genetic counseling training program, Gillian also brings significant experience in genetics education and outreach.
Gillian completed her doctoral degree in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University and her masters degree in Genetic Counseling at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health / National Human Genome Research Institute Genetic Counseling Training Program. She has been actively involved in the National Society of Genetic Counselors, serving on multiple committees and holding leadership positions in the Familial Cancer and Research Special Interest Groups.