Genetic Counseling/Consultation in South‐East Asia: A Report from the Workshop at the 10th Asia Pacific Conference on Human Genetics

This paper reports on the workshop ‘Genetic Counseling/Consultations in South‐East Asia’ at the 10 th Asia Pacific Conference on Human Genetics in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in December 2012. The workshop brought together professionals and language/communication scholars from South‐East Asia, and the UK. The workshop aimed at addressing culture‐ and context‐specific genetic counseling/consultation practices in South‐East Asia. As a way of contextualizing genetic counseling/consultation in South‐East Asia, we first offer an overview of communication‐oriented research generally, drawing attention to consultation and counseling as part of a communicative continuum with distinctive interactional features. We then provide examples of genetic counseling/consultation research in Hong Kong. As other countries in South‐East Asia have not yet embarked on communication‐oriented empirical research, we report on the current practices of genetic counseling/consultation in these countries in order to identify similarities and differences as well as key obstacles that could be addressed through future research. Three issues emerged as ‘problematic’: language, religion and culture. We suggest that communication‐oriented research can provide a starting point for evidence‐based reflections on how to incorporate a counseling mentality in genetic consultation. To conclude, we discuss the need for creating a platform for targeted training of genetic counselors based on communication‐oriented research findings.