The UK Genethics Club: clinical ethics support for genetic services.

The UK Genethics Club was established in November 2001 in order to provide a national forum of ethics support for the profession of clinical genetics in the UK. The forum brings together health professionals, medical ethicists and lawyers and support is provided through detailed discussion of cases and sharing of good practice. Clinical genetics professionals had previously voiced concerns about making extremely difficult ethical decisions, with profound implications, in something of a vacuum. Professionals saw a lack of guidance in the area and lack of time for discussion of difficult cases as reasons for this. This paper describes the origins of the group and gives (anonymized) examples of some of the types of issues discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]