1. Clinical pathway
Identify a clinical pathway where genomic medicine will be required for delivery (either for testing or management).
The Clinical Pathway Initiative is a collaboration between NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSE/I), Health Education England (HEE) and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AoMRC) to facilitate the integration of genomic medicine through the alignment of patient pathways, workforce development and education/training requirements.
The aims of the initiative are to:
- introduce a unified approach to the integration of genomic medicine across the different specialties;
- identify the workforce development and education needs;
- harness and share expertise from around the country;
- avoid duplication of effort around resource development; and
- provide a ‘bite-sized’ clinically relevant approach to genomic medicine.
Downloads
To support you in developing your own clinical pathway project, we have developed some handy downloads:
How to develop a clinical pathway project
Each clinical pathway project is built around a patient pathway and is the approved Genomic Medicine Service resource.
The pathway should be high-level and linear, and many are likely to be smaller sections of larger pathways or networks.
Click through the steps below to see how a pathway project can be developed.
2. Component pathways
Reduce a larger pathway into its shorter component pathways.*
3. Component steps
Break down each pathway into its component steps; likely to be between three and five steps.
4. Competency alignment
Align the steps to the competency required to deliver each of these steps.**
5. Education and training
Identify the education and training that is required to develop the competencies to deliver each of the steps.
6. Workforce groups
Align the pathway to the workforce group who will be delivering each step of the pathway.
* For instance, a larger pathway to investigate an intellectual disability might be divided into two smaller pathways: a) requesting genomic testing; and b) interpreting and feeding back results.
**Consult with the Genomics Education Programme’s competency frameworks.
For an in-depth look at how to develop a clinical pathway project, read through the information pack and template.
Established clinical pathway projects
Among other key areas, we are prioritising five of the national transformation projects (Lynch syndrome, monogenic diabetes, familial hypercholesterolaemia, sudden cardiac death and DPYD) to formulate into a framework structure. By piloting this approach, we hope to develop a sustainable infrastructure going forward.
Once the pathway structures for these projects have been completed, these will be made available on this website so that they can be nationally accessed, modified for local/regional needs and used in clinical practice.
Below you will see a table of established clinical pathway projects so that, if you are inspired to initiate a pathway project, you can see which ones are already under way.
| Clinical pathway project | Lead | Status |
| Familial hypercholesterolaemia | Jude Hayward, North East and Yorkshire GMSA | Final review |
| Glioma | Dani Lynch, South West GMSA | In progress |
| Hirschsprung’s disease | Joanne Kennedy, South West GMSA | In progress |
| Neurology | Heidy Brandon, South East GMSA | In progress |
| Newborn screening | Amanda Pichini, Genomics England | Scoping |
| Renal | Heidy Brandon, South East GMSA | In progress |
View the guidance
You can view an exemplar of a clinical pathway project as part of our information pack, which includes further details, handy flow charts, templates and guidance.
Developing education to support the pathway
A considerable education and training package will be required to deliver each of the pathway structures that are developed. Ideally, these resources would be 1) developed in line with a framework or template and 2) hosted/signposted on this website so that they can be easily accessed and nationally shared.
The Genomics Education Programme (GEP) is developing a new resource called GeNotes (genomic notes for clinicians), which we hope will be the ideal platform to develop and disseminate many of these resources.
If you are interested in finding out more about, contributing to or using the GeNotes platform as the repository for relevant framework educational tools, please see Appendix 1 of the information pack, which includes the resource development process and templates.
Governance
All clinical pathway projects will be ratified by the NHSE/I and HEE joint workforce steering group and AoMRC’s genomics group before being uploaded to the GEP website and nationally disseminated.
You can choose either to submit your completed project via email or present the project yourself at either of the group’s meetings.
Contact us
If you have a question about the Clinical Pathway Initiative, please contact the team.
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