Professional Roles and Responsibilities

Medical oncologist Richard J. LoCicero, MD, believes navigators fill in the patient care blanks offering their value as coordinators, shoulders of support, and negotiators.

Healthcare continues to change with a focus on prevention and outpatient care versus the long-standing way of reactive, inpatient acute care. There continues to be a role for inpatient care in oncology, but payer sources will reward the limitation of hospital visits in the future.

One of the dilemmas navigators experience—being able to plan their time well, as well as to explain to others in designated blocks of time how their time is allocated on a given day or throughout a given week. Some time measurement is easy—3 hours spent conducting a community outreach event, for example.

After a recent navigation presentation, a participant approached me and commented, “Thank you, now I understand what our navigator does in her role.” The comment caused me to reflect...could that be the case where many of us work? Do people in our healthcare system know what we do?

When working with systems that are contemplating a navigation program or when navigators visit our site because they have been hired to navigate but can not seem to find their niche, this is a question everyone asks at the beginning. It is stressed throughout the navigation world that there is not a standardized navigation program that can fit everywhere.

In the spring of 2010, the Academy of Oncology Nurse Navigators (AONN) was invited to participate in the National Patient Navigator Leadership Summit held in Atlanta, Georgia.