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Paper long abstract

Personalised medicine is frequently presented as a straightforward pathway to inclusive and effective care. Yet, as data-driven approaches become increasingly embedded within healthcare systems, concerns are emerging about what kind of ‘personalisation’ is being prioritised and for whom. Through my presentation, I will examine how ‘ethnicity’, a socially complex and politically charged category, is operationalised in genomic medicine, and how its current uses sit uneasily with ambitions for equitable and solidaristic healthcare.

Within the UK National Health Service (NHS), information about ethnicity is routinely collected for population-level monitoring, including equity of access and service utilisation. In genomic medicine, however, ethnicity is additionally mobilised as a proxy for biological ancestry to support the interpretation of genomic data. Despite resting on different epistemic assumptions, these two aims of equity monitoring and clinical interpretation are frequently conflated into a single variable within standardised data infrastructures and algorithmic workflows.

Drawing on qualitative interviews with healthcare professionals involved in genomic medicine, including clinical geneticists, genetic counsellors, lab scientists, and nursing teams, I will examine how ethnicity is interpreted and used in everyday clinical work. By foregrounding healthcare professionals’ perspectives, I will highlight the tensions between administrative classification systems, clinical utility, and ethical concerns about stigma and racialisation. I will argue that attention to the conceptual ambiguity, affective labour, and structural constraints involved in ethnicity recording is essential for understanding how genomic medicine is being integrated into routine care in ways that are equitable and socially responsive.