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Learning Objective 1: Describe how Native Navigation may be helpful as an intervention for Native American people who are in need of cancer care.
Learning Objective 2: Analyze how existing cancer education programs may be tailored for Comanche people.
A Native Navigator is a NA who assists a person in a NA community to navigate the healthcare system by providing outreach and education, ensuring access to screening examinations, and guiding patients with a suspicious finding through and around barriers in the complex cancer care system. This is a particularly appropriate strategy for NAs, who have a historical mistrust of outsiders.
This multidisciplinary project (nursing, public health, and statistics), funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research, employs a community-based participatory approach using mixed methods to examine use of Native Navigators as an intervention in the Comanche Nation. Goal setting based on principles of Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS) will be implemented with NA participants in community cancer education workshops given by Native Navigators as a means of assisting NAs to make progress towards achieving behavior change.
The goal of this project is to test GAS to assist the Comanche Nation in refining, expanding and adapting various navigator models currently used in other NA communities to address the community’s and patients’ needs across the continuum of cancer care.
Findings: The process of tailoring educational modules for Comanche Nation will be shared. Qualitative analysis of focus groups with Comanche community members regarding tailoring of the modules will be completed in March 2010, and findings will be presented.
Implications: Preliminary analysis reveals that members of the Comanche community need cancer educational modules tailored to their culture in order to become engaged and maintain interest in educational sessions. They want to choose goals that are easy to understand and attainable.