Patient Navigation
Our Patient Navigation Workgroup has designed interventions to reduce illness and death from cancer for women living east of the Anacostia River.
Our initiative will strengthen existing patient navigation systems to ease the burden of a woman’s cancer journey by addressing the barriers that prevent patients from prioritizing cancer screenings, prevention, treatment, and survivorship care.
Roadmap to Change
Strengthen and expand the patient navigation infrastructure
Address misogynoir in healthcare
Increase education and awareness of the role of patient navigation in care
Our interventions include:
Cancer navigation training.
A curriculum will inform patients, practitioners, and care providers about the importance and benefits of
patient navigation across the cancer care continuum. We will support women on their cancer journey by
building a database of caregivers and providers.
Cancer clinical trials training.
Despite clinical trials being an essential way to access innovative cancer care, less than a quarter of Black
people nationwide report being informed of clinical trial options by healthcare providers. Our
intervention will provide researchers and providers with concrete strategies to ensure regular inclusion
of Black patients in clinical trials, while tracking referrals and enrollment of Black women.
Thought leader forum with integrative wellness champions.
Integrative wellness is an evidence-based strategy to advance cancer care. Convening champions of the
model will define integrative wellness in the District and advance availability for Black women in Wards
7 & 8, improving women’s experience and health outcomes.
Cancer Data Infrastructure Task Force. This intervention will
establish an entity to convene key stakeholders across the District that collect cancer data relevant to
District residents. Convening regularly, the task force will perform a landscape analysis of cancer data
that identifies cancer data inequities, with special attention paid to Wards 7 & 8.
Increase to the number of Black women practitioners. Black women East of the River tell us
they strongly prefer healthcare providers that look like them but only about 5% of medical doctors are Black. To increase this number, we will support a sustainable pipeline for Black
healthcare providers and advance Black
women entering the health field.
Anti-misogynoir training.
Misogynoir is the intersection of anti-Black racism and misogyny resulting in the gaslighting of Black
women. We will establish anti-misogynoir training for health practitioners so they can gain an understanding of the ways in which implicit and
explicit levels of racism and misogynoir manifest in healthcare delivery.
Cancer Patient Bill of Rights for Black women East
of the River and annual assessment. The
Bill of Rights will include measures for accountability, including regular assessments of cancer clinics,
primary care centers, and hospitals that serve Black women in Wards 7 & 8 to ensure that healthcare
settings and/or systems are honoring Black women East of the River.
"Best practices" position statement on dismantling
misogynoir. A position statement will center the humanization of Black women while advocating for increases in
Black healthcare providers and training to eliminate anti-Black racism across the healthcare system.
Cancer navigation landscape analysis. We will map the current cancer navigation continuum; outline various roles and settings in which
navigation takes place; understand what types of navigation services are being provided; and where and
when they are provided with the goal of improving their quality and efficiency.
Augment cancer patient navigation system.
We seek to increase the number of patient navigators available to Black women in Wards 7 & 8, as well
as augment the breadth and depth of services by creating a patient navigation coordinating body. The patient navigator network will provide an infrastructure to better facilitate the
transfer of patients between primary care and specialty care, ongoing training and information sharing
for patient navigators, and better access to patient navigation resources.
Tiered approach to cancer patient navigation.
We will develop guidelines for patient care that are tiered to meet the needs of Black women in Wards 7 & 8. A standardized assessment tool
will be developed based on existing research and validated for Black women East of the River.
Sustainable funding and reimbursement for cancer
patient navigation.
We want to create and test a methodology that could establish sustainable funding for cancer patient
navigation. This could be based on the Collaborative Approach to Public Good Investments model that
utilizes funding from multiple sources.
54%
Black residents experience cancer at a 54% higher rate than White residents
90%
Cancer mortality rates for Black people are 90% higher than Whites