An Examination of Patients’ Experiences with Navigation Services in Alberta’s Healthcare System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The concept of patient navigation (PN) was first envisioned to assist marginalized cancer patients access appropriate and timely healthcare resources. While this understanding of PN may still hold for a subgroup of programs today, the expansion of PN over the past 30 years has resulted in a diverse set of interventions with distinct care settings, patient eligibility criteria, navigator training, and program objectives. Noting this, our study sought to better understand how PN has evolved by gathering information on patients’ perspectives and interactions with PN programs across Alberta. Our objectives were to (i) explore patients’ current experiences with PN programs, and (ii) identify the features of PN felt to be of particular value to patients. Methods: To address these objectives, we conducted an interpretive descriptive study to collate the experiences of adult patients with longitudinal exposure to Albertan PN programs (involvement for greater than or equal to one month). Participant recruitment occurred via key informant sampling with navigators across Alberta. One-on-one semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore patient experiences with PN and their understanding of it as a broader concept. Inductive thematic analysis and interpretive exercises were subsequently performed to construct a coherent message from the data. Continued collaboration with two patient partners was maintained throughout the study to ensure responsiveness to patient priorities. Results: This study involved 23 participants with experience using nurse navigators, transition navigators, and lay community health navigators. Irrespective of navigation type, the participants’ stories were tethered by their navigators’ promotion of seamless and personalized care, as well as their ability to seemingly humanize the healthcare system. This was accomplished through a set of participant-identified navigator characteristics, including approachability, accessibility, and comprehensive systems knowledge. While the identified functions and characteristics of navigators were consistent across participants, how these components were operationalized varied based on the program’s setting and the particular needs of each patient. Conclusion: As a patient-centred intervention, understanding patients’ experiences and valuations of PN is critical to distilling the essence of the intervention. This research directly addresses ongoing knowledge gaps surrounding contemporary understandings of PN, particularly from patients’ perspectives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".