Another hat I wear is that I chair the specialty committee for medical genetics at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. It is part of our purview, along with our specialty society, the Canadian College of Medical Geneticists, to think about human resource planning, both for medical geneticists and for genetic counsellors.
It's a complex issue in regard to how you train a physician, which takes a long time, and then ensure that physicians have a place to be hired to. It may seem paradoxical, but it is a fear for these trainees when they're done, unless there's a job.
We're working on those issues, to be sure, but I think that even if we doubled or tripled the number of geneticists, if we're thinking about getting genetic testing out to all Canadians, there will never be enough. My profession is going to have to take a more active role in educating all physicians about what this technology means and how to use it. We're also thinking about ways to do that.