Nurse Navigation

Being an ear to listen or a voice to help navigate patients through their cancer journey can provide the catalyst they need to remain positive as they fight the disease.

Metrics and benchmarks are a vital part of the value proposition behind navigation, but these vignettes illustrate how even the smallest gesture can make a big difference for our patients.

Language barriers can mean patients put off preventive screenings, and even treatment, for fear of being misunderstood by their healthcare providers.

Two nurse navigators report on the importance of equitable access to care, regardless of a patient's social connections, socioeconomic status, of philanthropy history.

Melissa Andres, BSN, RN, OCN, discusses the growing role of nurse navigators and the rewards she has found in this specialty.

Can I land my helicopter on top of the hospital? Can the doctor see my daughter before the clinic is open so she doesn’t miss too much work?

Coordination of care and educating patients and their caregivers needs to be the standard of care.

Supporting patients and families with a truly holistic and healing approach.

An oncology nurse navigator learns just how essential the role is, when her own husband is diagnosed with melanoma and a colleague provided just the right support.

Please enjoy this music while your party is reached … "Hello, Mr. Freeman,* this is Venteria Knight. I'm a nurse navigator with Northside Hospital, and we met at the prostate cancer screening last week."

The patient's daughter had not been at the initial consult and thus had only secondhand information from her father and mother.

Linda told me the too often heard story of a routine chest x-ray before surgery, and suddenly, the anxiety over having a gallbladder removed was overshadowed by the news that the x-ray revealed a large lung mass.

Many studies are currently assessing the role of patient navigation in achieving both quantitative and qualitative improvements in cancer care, and metrics have been developed to capture demonstrable evidence for this relatively new subspecialty of oncology nursing practice. Yet amidst all this fact-finding lives an individual patient with cancer.

This college admissions essay, penned by 17-year-old Samantha Stephens, offers a powerful and poignant reminder of the impact a cancer diagnosis can have on a patient's family and caregivers.

I have been living with stage IV lung cancer for three years, not because I have the disease, but because my husband does.