Patient Navigation Interventions to Improve Palliative Care for the Underserved: Integrating the Voice of the Community and Scientific Rigor (335)

Abstract

1.Discuss how patient navigators delivering a culturally tailored intervention can address and improve palliative care outcomes for underserved populations.2.Recognize how to design, implement, and manualize a palliative care training curriculum for a patient navigator.3.Recognize basic process measures and techniques to ensure scientific rigor in palliative care patient navigator interventions. Palliative care recognizes that cultural values can have a major impact on care preferences at the end of life for many patients. Therefore, a one-size-fits-all approach will not be sufficient and may widen the gap of cultural differences and health disparities in palliative care. Community-based culturally tailored interventions, often utilizing community health workers or patient navigators, have been shown to reduce health disparities in preventive health, cancer screening, diagnosis, and treatment. In this session we will describe the use of patient navigators to deliver culturally tailored interventions and show how a novel patient navigator intervention can improve palliative care outcomes for underserved populations. We will discuss the history of patient navigation, how the principles and strategies of patient navigation integrate with palliative care, and demonstrate how to develop and manualize a training curriculum that can be tailored to specific populations and designed to target specific symptoms or aspects of palliative care. We will also demonstrate the need for process and outcome measures for patient navigator interventions. Participants will learn the basic principles and importance of measuring processes such as fidelity to the intervention, tracking cost of the interventions and health care utilization, and approaches to measuring actual processes of the intervention. The patient navigator model offers a unique and important opportunity to improve palliative care outcomes, build trust, and improve communication with underserved communities. However, the challenge for these interventions is to maintain methodological rigor so that successful interventions can be replicated and measured in a way that moves the field forward and elevates the state of science for palliative care.