AONN+ Blog

For more than a century, cancer care had a singular goal―to have the patient survive the disease and its treatment. With that achieved, the treatment team smiled, considering the treatment a success. Times have changed, and thankfully, treatments have changed, too.

While patients with cancer are actively receiving treatment, their navigators are in frequent contact with them, making sure they have and keep their appointments; remain on track for tests, scans, and other consultations; and the list goes on. When treatment is completed, patients receive a treatment summary and survivorship care plan, and then what?

I was privileged to chair a task force for the purpose of revisiting this standard and determining what issues lay within it that are barriers to cancer centers being able to achieve it. Upon the creation of such recommended changes, another task force for which I also served, reviewed these recommendations, and, I am pleased to say, approved them. Hot off the press, here is information that you get to hear even before it is announced to accredited facilities.

For those navigators caring for patients with advanced cancers, you have probably witnessed what I have—the patient wanting to stop treatment and the family (young husband or adult children) wanting to do an end run to the medical oncologist and say, “We want her to continue treatment and not give up. She is a candidate for drug therapy XYZ. I will talk her into continuing treatment.” And what happens?

Although patient navigation services are becoming more common at cancer programs nationwide, physicians and administrators still frequently ask, “What are the responsibilities of the navigator?”

One of the best roles a nurse navigator can incorporate into her daily routine when seeing a newly diagnosed patient is to begin educating the patient about clinical trials. All too often, patients associate the phrase “clinical trials” with “experimentation,” and, of course, this is not the case.

Ms. Strusowski recently co-authored an article on “Patient Navigation Metrics” for Oncology Issues, the journal of the Association of Community Cancer Centers. In this guest blog post, she explores this topic in the context of value-based care.

Documentation by oncology patient navigators can play an important role in your cancer program’s efforts to comply with the new Commission on Cancer (CoC) Standards that became effective in 2015. This blog reviews documentation-tool compliance—in other words—how your documentation tools can help you demonstrate compliance with CoC Standard 3.1 Patient Navigation Process and Standard 3.2 Psychosocial Distress Screening.

When patients are newly diagnosed with cancer, their focus is on getting the cancer out of their bodies. They may not be listening as well as they might under less stressful circumstances. This can result in an inability to absorb and comprehend all the information provided to them related to side effects from various treatments.