Difference Between Genetics and Genomics in Healthcare Practice  Difference Between Genetics and Genomics in Healthcar

Difference Between Genetics and Genomics in Healthcare Practice 

Difference Between Genetics and Genomics in Healthcare Practice

Genetics and genomics are close fields but have different levels of usage and application in healthcare and nursing practice. Genetics is the study of single genes and the inheritance of certain traits or disorder within a family. It is often applied to single gene disorders: cystic fibrosis or sickle cell disease and focuses on hereditary patterns, mutations, and risk analysis of individuals. Within nursing, genetics is used in the collection of family history, patient education and counseling as far as inherited diseases are concerned. The strategy facilitates strategic genetic testing and clinical decision making conjectured on existing variants of genes (Lashley, 2023).

Genomics, on the other hand, looks at the entire collection of genes in a person and its interaction with other genes as well as the environment and lifestyle conditions. Instead of studying individual genes, genomics studies the dynamic networks of genes that regulate disease predisposition, response to treatment and health outcome overall. This is the wide area of focus of precision medicine and pharmacogenomics. To nurses, genomics brings in new ethical issues of informed consent, data privacy and fair access to genomic based care. As Calzone et al. (2022) point out, the concept of genomic competency will help nurses to incorporate the risk assessment and prevention strategy into a regular practice.

Overall, genomics deals with the entire genome and all of its interactions with external factors, whereas genetics focuses on individual genes and hereditary diseases. Both are imperative to ethical, patient centered nursing care yet genomics has broader influence on healthcare systems and population health programs.

References

Calzone, K. A., Jenkins, J., Culp, S., Bonham, V. L., & Badzek, L. (2022). National nursing workforce survey of nursing attitudes, knowledge, and practice in genomics. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 54(1), 15–26. 

Lashley, F. R. (2023). Essentials of genetics in nursing practice (4th ed.). Springer Publishing Company.