Navigating healthcare was rarely straightforward before COVID; how much more difficult will it be in coming months and years as the ongoing impacts of the pandemic play out?
It is therefore more important than ever to focus on improving people’s experiences of #NavigatingHealth.
Our thanks to health systems researcher Siân Slade for taking the reins at @WePublicHealth recently to discuss these issues. A summary follows below (and a reminder that we welcome applications for guest tweeting at this account).
Siân Slade tweets:
Ensuring equitable access to systems and services is incredibly important and challenging but one we can all impact. Whilst there is GREAT work underway, how do we coalesce it?
This webinar was about meeting to discuss and make visible solutions, share learnings and build community across systems. Anyone interested in joining a Community of Practice, please contact @sianslade @audreyrollin1.
Through observing inequities in cancer outcomes in the late 70s in New York, Dr Harold Freeman introduced patient navigators to help women achieve equitable outcomes. Freeman identified four barriers to healthcare seeking: trust & emotional reasons, communication and information, and health systems.
Freeman’s work attracted considerable support. In 2005 the Patient Navigator and Chronic Disease Prevention Act was enacted in the US and the National Cancer Institute set up the Patient Navigation Research Program.
From these beginnings, Canada, the UK and now Australia have been developing patient navigation and care coordination as part of health system reform in chronic disease, including a focus on prevention and wellbeing connecting people to community assets through social prescribing.
More about the COTA work can be seen here.
Solutions focus
Reflecting on solutions and learnings shared at the webinar, solutions focused on creating capacity and community navigators.
For example, the great work from The Right Place in Tasmania, which from initial development is now being scaled across many communities.
And well as the specific roles, there is also opportunity to look at leveraging existing resources such as Making Every Contact Count (MECC), so we advocate for each other to help build understanding and capacity in a system that we all need at some time in our life or another.
Many of you may have listened to this podcast a few months ago from @profevasegelov. It is a very impactful, honest and humbling introduction to the personal challenges of health diagnoses, in this case when the health professional is the patient.
Many thanks for joining me in exploring access, advocacy, empowerment, communication. The focus? The right care for the right patient at the right time with the right empathy at the right cost.
Siân Slade is a UK-trained pharmacist, MPH, MBA, GAICD qualified and a PhD researcher in Health Systems at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. She is Deputy Chair of the Precision Health Community of Practice at the Australasian Institute of Digital Health and a Board Director at LiverWELL and the Leukaemia Foundation of Australia.
Follow on Twitter: @sianslade
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