The Navigation principles are a fundamental part of the nursing and midwifery role. Navigation aims to facilitate the consumer journey in what has become an increasingly complex health system. This facilitation will be achieved by reducing fragmentation, mitigating barriers, educating, empowering and coordinating consumer driven care. These roles are intended to transcend across multiple specialities, support nurse and midwife-led service models, and augment existing models of care within a facility or clinical area.
- Creating Partnerships.
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- Provide a central point of communication, engagement and coordination for all stakeholders involved in consumer care.
- Ensure all stakeholders (most importantly the consumer, their family, and their carer(s)) are equal contributing partners in the consumer care journey.
- Establish consistent and effective lines of communication across primary and tertiary care providers using innovative communication pathways where needed.
- Facilitate clinical care review meetings, particularly those focusing on discharge planning and continuing management.
- Coordination of Consumer-Centred Care
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- Provide holistic consumer-centred care coordination across the entire consumer journey by enhancing systems integration and reducing fragmentation and barriers
- Enhance consumer quality of life:
- Utilise and support the application of evidence-based patient centred care pathways that are responsive to changing consumer needs
- Coordinate timely access to appropriate health and social services when necessary.
- Facilitating Systems Improvements
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- Provide a leadership role within the organisation and act as an agent for change, with the role reflected in the organisational structure.
- Possess high-level systems literacy that allows the promotion of cohesion across the health continuum to reduce fragmentation, duplication, time delays, inappropriate treatment and other barriers to effective consumer-centred care.
- Assess the functional and systems level barriers to effective communication of referral pathways and flow of information, to support consumer-centred care which addresses the identified barriers.
- Lead quality improvement activities and participate in research relevant to the assessment and development of the role on an ongoing basis. This may take the form of collating data on outcome measures, key performance indicators (KPIs), staff and consumer satisfaction, or other health service improvement activities.
- Improving Consumer Outcomes
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- Foster and encourage active consumer engagement in the development of health care goals which promote self-management and seek to improve consumer health literacy.
- Enhance health literacy to support consumer and their families to make informed decisions about their health care options including advanced care planning.
