New senior appointments for UTS Genetic Counselling

UTS Genetic Counselling has welcomed a new leader with the appointment of Ms Lucinda Freeman. A senior clinician and clinical researcher and a staunch advocate for the genetic counselling profession in Australia, Freeman will lead the discipline’s flourishing teaching and research program into the next stage of its evolution.

Freeman has more than 15 years’ experience in the genetic counselling field. She has held clinical roles at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and Royal North Shore Hospital and has built a program of research focused on prenatal and reproductive genetics. She’s also a former secretary of the Australasian Society of Genetic Counselling.

She was inspired to join the UTS team after working alongside a number of graduates from the Master of Genetic Counselling.  

“I had UTS students on placement with me in my clinical role, and they were far beyond my expectations of not only what a graduate should know but how they intersect with the field of genetic counselling,” she says.

“That, to me, showed that there was this feeling embedded in the course that it wasn’t just about the knowledge and the content students were getting, but it was also how they were practising self-reflection to improve their professional practice.”

Freeman herself is no stranger to excellence. In 2017, she became a Churchill Fellow, travelling to the US and the UK to explore how both countries were embedding genetic counselling in mainstream medical care.

She immediately saw the possibilities for genetic counsellors in Australia: on her return, she established the NSW Health Genetic Counselling Network Advisory Committee and became its inaugural chair.

The committee has been instrumental in raising the profile of genetic counsellors within the broader health care sector in NSW. It advocates both for genetic counselling to be better integrated into mainstream medical care and for genetic counsellors to work to the extent of their scope of practice.

There was this feeling embedded in the course that it wasn’t just about the knowledge and the content students were getting, but it was also how they were practising self-reflection to improve their professional practice.

Lucinda Freeman
Head of School, Genetic Counselling

“At the time, genetic counsellors were a small group of niche practitioners who didn’t really have representation where we really should have been part of the allied health conversation,” Freeman says.

“Establishing the committee allowed us to work better together so NSW Health could see who we are and what we are capable of.” 

At UTS, Freeman sees her role as an opportunity to lead the Genetic Counselling discipline through its next evolution. The last five years have been focused on establishing the master’s degree; the next phase, Freeman says, will be raising its profile among local and international markets to increase the diversity of the future workforce.

“It’s a blended learning program, delivered mostly online, which means we can reach many more students and we can really increase the diversity of students as they engage in learning from wherever they’re living,” she says.

“Students bring their range of backgrounds and experiences, which increases the shared learning and the capabilities of the graduates from the program.”

She also wants to continue building the program’s research capacity and establish new collaborations with the other allied health disciplines within the Graduate School of Health.

Freeman’s appointment is accompanied by that of Associate Professor Adrienne Sexton, a highly experienced clinician, researcher and educator who will take on a senior teaching and research supervision role at UTS. 

A current member of the Board of Censors in Genetic Counselling for Australasia, Associate Professor Sexton brings with her a clinical interest in neurogenetics and a research program focused on the use of qualitative methodologies to improve genetic counselling practice.

Learn more about Genetic Counselling at the Graduate School of Health.