"Equity" in genomic health policies: a review of policies in the international arena.

Introduction: The field of genomics is rapidly evolving and has made significant impact on the diagnosis and understanding of rare and genetic diseases, in guiding precision medicine in cancer treatment, and in providing personalized risk assessment for disease development and treatment responses. However, according to the literature, there is widespread socio economic and racial inequities in the diagnosis, treatment, and in the use of genomic medicine services. This policy review sets out to explore the concept of equity in access to genomic care, the level of inclusion of equity and how it is addressed and what mechanisms are in place to achieve equity in genomic care in the international health policy.

Precision medicine in Australia: indigenous health professionals are needed to improve equity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

Precision medicine, also known as "personalised medicine", seeks to identify strategies in the prevention and treatment of disease informed by a patient's genomic information. This allows a targeted approach to disease identification with the intention of reducing the burden of illness. Currently, both the emerging field of precision medicine and the established field of clinical genetics are highly reliant on genomic databases which are fraught with inbuilt biases, particularly from sample populations.