National Cancer Institute Community Cancer Centers Program Navigation Assessment Tool

May 2016 Vol 7, No 4

As all navigation programs are built uniquely, we encourage you to rate your program as you feel appropriate. The purpose of this form is not to gauge one program against another, but to assist you in building a stronger navigation program. This form can be used to assess an individual tumor site or the entire program

Definitions

Key Stakeholders: Those people that you feel are essential to making a program work. Include administration, navigators, staff, physicians (both employed and private practice). Specialty areas include medical, surgical, and radiation oncology; rehab; palliative care; and hospice.

Community Partnerships: Those entities that exist within and outside your program that you need the support of or are a referral source for patient use and contribute to the support of the patient along the continuum of their care.

Acuity System: Ability to determine appropriate level of care/intervention based on patient need and disease process.

Risk Factors: Variable associations with increased risk of complications with disease and treatment of cancer.

Metrics/Reporting Measures: Measuring activities and performance.

Percentage of Patients Navigated: Cancer patients inclusive of analytic cases, new diagnosed primaries, reoccurrences, advanced diseases, metastatic of defined cancer site(s) within your program setting.

Continuum of Navigation: Navigation functional areas include: outreach/screening, abnormal finding to diagnosis, treatment, outpatient and/or inpatient, survivorship, and end-of-life care. Navigation can occur along any or all of these. One single person may do all of these, or you may have one person designated to cover one area of the continuum. They may be disease-specific navigators or cover all diseases within that category. The sign of a level 5 site is that navigation is continuous across the cancer care continuum.

Disparity: Any underrepresented group that your program is able to focus on. Providing outreach and effort in this population is a hallmark of navigation according to its original conception and should be continued as part of a navigation program.

Tools for Reporting Navigator Statistics: Documents to help evaluate and measure a navigation program.

MDC Involvement: Multidisciplinary team approach to care, including physicians (med onc, rad onc, and surgeon) and other healthcare providers to create plan of care for patient; patient may not always be present to be considered at an MDC.

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Last modified: August 10, 2023

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