ABSTRACT
It is basic to most kinds of professional work that its practitioners should combine a high level of specific knowledge together with a capacity to empathise with their clients. This requires two very different types of understanding, and research indicates that they may, at times, be in conflict with each other. Genetic counsellors, like doctors, lawyers, and teachers, show other professional characteristics which include making decisions about new situations, autonomously, ‘on the hoof’. How can genetic counsellors be prepared for this decision-making when, armed only with difficult and sometimes uncertain knowledge from the world of genetics, they stand alone amid the raw emotion of a family which may have had to face a terrible prognosis for their new baby, or the recent death of a child?
