Giving Compass' Take:

• The Wake Forest Baptist Health Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Office of Cancer Health Equity successfully uses patient navigation to help non-english speakers who have cancer understand health treatments, services, insurance, and more.

• Patient navigation is a program designed to eliminate barriers to cancer screening, diagnosis, treatment, and support. How can more hospitals and healthcare centers adopt this practice? 

• Learn why a lack of trust is cited as a major barrier to patient-centered care. 

Soledad Estrada-Castrejon felt self-conscious about her rosary. It wasn’t that anyone had said anything negative. Still, she wasn’t entirely comfortable clutching her beads and praying around people she didn’t know. Maria Alejandra Combs understood and offered Estrada-Castrejon reassurance.

Estrada-Castrejon was born in Mexico; Combs in Venezuela—different cultures in many respects, quite similar in others. Both countries are predominantly Catholic.

Combs is the Hispanic patient navigator at Wake Forest Baptist Health Comprehensive Cancer Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Estrada-Castrejon, 26, has stage 4 ovarian cancer and says Combs makes her journey less arduous.

In big and small-but-significant ways, Combs serves as a guide for her Hispanic patients. She explains next steps, assists with forms, helps connect them with resources within the hospital system and beyond. She provides emotional support.

Patient navigation was introduced in 1990 by Harold P. Freeman, a surgeon in Harlem, with a program designed to eliminate barriers to cancer screening, diagnosis, treatment, and support.

Karen Winkfield, director of Wake Forest Baptist Health Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Office of Cancer Health Equity, says that Freeman was troubled by the number of African American women he was seeing with locally advanced breast cancer. He recognized the need for education on prevention and detection and available resources.

“So he recruited people from the community, lay individuals, and he gave them some basic understanding of what sorts of things are needed around breast care,” Winkfield says. “He educated them and then sent them out into the community to provide information.”

The result was a dramatic reduction in the number of women arriving in his offices with a locally advanced cancer.

The cancer center’s data indicates that the most common barriers to care for Hispanic patients are financial and insurance, transportation, and communication. Patients report 97% satisfaction with the navigation services they receive.

Read the full article about cancer treatment by Chris Winters at YES! Magazine.