Core principles in family history for all health care providers

In 2009, the National Institutes of Health State-of-the-Science Conference on Family History and Improving Health called for research to assess the value of family history for common diseases, and presented a research agenda that includes topics in family history structure, collection, and health and behavior outcomes. To achieve this research agenda and improve clinical care, health professionals and researchers must be competent in recording and interpreting a medical family tree or genetic family history. To encourage the incorporation of these skills into health care practice, the National Coalition for Health Professional Education in Genetics, with support from the National Society of Genetic Counselors, developed recommendations for family history collection, interpretation, and intervention, entitled Core Principles in Family History for all Health Care Providers. A multi-disciplinary working group, consisting of stakeholders in genomic medicine, nursing, social work, genetic counseling, education, and patient advocacy, collaborated to produce the Core Principles. This document focuses on the collection and basic interpretation of a medical family history in pedigree format for use of this information in patient care and management. All providers should be able to understand and interpret the basic symbols and structure of a pedigree; be able to record a multi-generational pedigree; be familiar with basic patterns of inheritance; be able to recognize genetic red flags in relation to family history as appropriate for their practice; and be able to assign general disease risks to a patient and, as pertinent, to at-risk relatives. We will present the Core Principles and related work here.