Prenatal diagnosis and genetic screening : community and service implications / a report of the Royal College of Physicians.

  • Royal College of Physicians of London.
Date:
1989
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Prenatal diagnosis and genetic screening : community and service implications / a report of the Royal College of Physicians. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    8/80 (page VI)
    resources. The problems increasingly reflect missed opportunities for the entire community, but their effects are particularly distressing for couples at risk of having a child with an inherited disorder. Prenatal diagnostic services therefore fall into overlapping categories: community services based on better methods of population screening which ought to be delivered through the primary health care system and the obstetric and other hospital services, and specialist clinical genetics and fetal medicine services. Both should provide for pre-pregnancy and pregnancy screening. This Royal College of Physicians report reflects a widespread and growing concern over the present and future problems in service delivery, problems which are essentially interdisciplinary. A recent King’s Fund Consensus conference addressed the same issues [1], reaching very similar conclusions. The nature of prenatal diagnosis and the requirements for its effective delivery must be better defined if health authorities are to respond appropriately to the existing as well as the new possibilities.