The position is just a few years old at this point, but nurse navigators are proving their worth as they shepherd patients and families in their journeys through the healthcare system.
What does a nurse navigator do? In an interview with the Mooresville Tribune, Arin McClune, MSN, RNC-OB, Women’s Services Navigator at Lake Norman Regional Medical Center, defines the nurse navigator as “a nurse who will help the patient facilitate and coordinate their care, depending on what their specific needs are. So whether it’s to coordinate care with the physician, with seminars, education, and then follow up on pre-hospitalization, during their hospitalization, as well as their discharge time to ensure that all their needs are being met and that their outcomes are what their goals were, their expectations.”
According to RegisteredNursing.org, nurse navigators have quickly established their value: “Organizations that choose to create roles for nurse navigators are putting the patient at the center of the care, and increased patient satisfaction scores reinforce this fact. Numerous articles are published each year touting not only the intangibles such as the patient’s perceived improvement of care, but also decreased hospital readmission rates and ED visits in the departments where nurse navigators are utilized.”
Nurse navigators primarily work with oncology patients, being instituted, as RegisteredNursing.org notes, to provide “one-on-one contact with patients to offer resources and education regarding the planned treatment,” and to act as “a liaison between the patient and all members of the care team.” With their successful implementation in oncology, nurse navigators now specialize in a wide range of areas. In the Mooresville Tribune article, for example, the navigators interviewed cover everything from bariatric surgery to breast health, and chest pain/stroke patients. For Tina Hunter, a breast health specialist who spoke with the Tribune, the position brings with it some of the classic rewards of nursing: “I enjoy teaching patients, having that one-on-one time with the patients that I take care of. We all enjoy talking to patients, spending time and we wanted to do more of that.”
What requirements are needed to work in this field? Nurse.org suggests “solid clinical experience in a specific area of nursing care (usually several years)” and certification in a specialty area of practice, or in oncology nurse navigation. They also remark that the ranks of nurse navigators often include nurse practitioners and clinical nurse specialists. In assessing the abilities needed to be successful in the field, the journal Nursing Management notes that the well-trained nurse navigator “reaches out proactively, facilitates communication between providers, prevents delays in treatment, offers psychological support, monitors and manages symptoms, and identifies and recommends resources.”
As Jaycee Dedmon, BSN, RN, ONC, orthopedic nurse navigator says, the role involves more than just guiding patients through paperwork (though that is part of the job, too): “It’s very overwhelming for patients. I think a lot of what I do is trying to alleviate some of those fears and anxieties that they have about their surgery or their diagnosis, because it’s a lot. It’s scary to have to need surgery or be in the hospital and so (we do) as much (as) we can to try to provide them information that’s in a way that they understand. We could give them all the papers in the world but if they don’t understand what it means, then we aren’t doing our job as navigators.”
To learn more about nurse navigators, visit the Academy of Oncology Nurse and Patient Navigators, or see the Nurse.org article on careers in this field.
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