Abstract
In Wales, we increasingly face the challenge of delivering highly specialised health-care services from the capital city Cardiff, to remote clinical sites. The problem for the delivery of cancer genetics services in Wales is that Cardiff is off-centre and geographically distant from a major proportion of the population based in North Wales. Furthermore, much of this population is rural and scattered, with poor travel links. It was impractical to increase the already extensive travelling time to North Wales undertaken by Cardiff-based consultants, but a balance needed to be sought between increasing local staff, maintaining centralisation of resources and achieving a critical mass of expertise and personnel.
Therefore, the Cancer Genetics Service for Wales (CGSW) began exploring new approaches to service delivery that would allow us to expand our capacity to give information at sites distant to the main specialist centre, while maintaining the quality of service and information provided. A pilot study was conducted to explore the acceptability to patients and health-care professionals of telegenetics as a means of delivering medical genetic information between Cardiff and North Wales. This paper examines the professionals' perspective, and how they interacted with each other, and with the technology.
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