Dr. Chanita Hughes Halbert and PhD student Kelsie Campbell presented a poster at the American Cancer Society’s Grantee meeting for the ACS Navigation Capacity Building Network. The team has been working with patient navigators at USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, for the past two years. The Navigation Capacity-Building Initiative Grant Program is a component of the ACS’s commitment to enhancing oncology patient navigation and addressing barriers to individualized, timely, and equitable access to care for cancer patients and their families. Hughes Halbert and Campbell collected data alongside nurse navigators, to understand their navigation caseloads, social barriers to care that cancer patients face, and how patient navigation can reduce the time between diagnosis and initial treatment. USC Norris has a long-standing commitment to patient navigation and the assessment of this work, through the support of ACS, will help to improve the quality of navigation and develop standard metrics for measuring success.
The research team was joined at the Grantee Meeting by three clinical nurse navigators from USC Norris: Charis Stewart, Rita Navarro-Cramond, and Mariana Dobre. After the ACS meeting, the group also attended the Association of Oncology Nurse and Navigators (AONN) Annual Conference in Atlanta.