| dc.description.abstract | Genomics is an emerging discipline, which focuses on the interactions between genetics and environmental factors leading to clinical and public health implications. Integrating genomics within healthcare can ultimately impact the population health ethically and responsibly. While it has been advocated that health professional students need genomics education, information regarding the genomics education status among this group is lacking. After graduating, health professional students can apply what they have learned into practice, become a multidisciplinary team member in genomics, and ultimately meet the public’s needs for genetics education and services, This dissertation reflects two studies. The purpose of the first study, a systematic literature review, is to critically evaluate the existing genomics education curricula available to health professional students. The following questions guided this literature review (1) What are the characteristics of existing genomics education curricula for health professional students? and (2) What are the evaluation findings for those genomics education curricula? Results from this systematic review study provide information on the numbers, findings, and quality of existing genomic education curricula for health professional students. In the second study, the primary aim of this study is to assess if a web-based short genomics course impacted genomics knowledge as well as attitudes, self-efficacy, and intention for incorporating genomic competencies in future practice among undergraduate health education students at the Texas A&M University.
Following the completion of genomics training, participating health education students increased family health history (FHH) knowledge showed significant and positive improvements in FHH knowledge as well as attitudes, self-efficacy, and intention in adopting FHH into their future practice The findings from the studies have direct implications and recommendations for researchers, educators, and healthcare professionals. Specifically, it can potentially help (a) healthcare professionals and educators to develop theoretically and methodologically rigorous genetics/genomics curricula for training health professional students, (b) create genomically competent health workforce in the future to assist the genetic service providers with increasing genetic/genomics demands, and (c) overcome the translational gap between genomics advances and its practice. | |
