By Tasmira Mohib
How do newcomers learn about the healthcare system and navigate through it in their newly adopted country?
A new healthcare system navigation may involve understanding the process of applying for healthcare cards, finding information on healthcare structure, understanding the access of family physician and walk-in physicians, searching for family physicians, making appointments with physicians, understanding the hospital and laboratory services, difference between urgent care and emergency care services and availability of other healthcare resources.
When immigrating to a new country, newcomers are not offered any formal orientation program or resources to assist them in navigating the healthcare system. This may lead to delays in seeking care, negatively influence the settlement journey of newcomers, and cause stress and anxiety. Newcomers attempt to learn about healthcare access and navigation using informal sources such as community members, friends and family, Google, and community social media platforms. Although newcomers may not formally identify them as a community health navigator, these community members act as the navigation media for the community. A community-based health navigator could be an individual residing within the specified community facilitated with digitalized tools to assist the community in navigating different parts of the complex healthcare system and resources.
“Patient navigation” has been a known concept for some time now. It usually refers to navigation services in promoting timely diagnosis and management of patients by eliminating barriers of healthcare access.
The concept has been mostly used in helping patients navigating the healthcare facilities staying within the healthcare system. The services are provided under the designation of patient navigator, case manager, community health outreach coordinators, patient advocates, health promotion advocates and community health representatives, community enablers, community-engaged health navigator, non-clinical navigator and care navigator.
However, the scope of this concept can be broadened to act as a pre-system resource for newcomers in informing them about the healthcare system of their newly adopted countries. In order to achieve this, we need to talk to newcomer communities to gain insights and co-design the role of community health navigator to make it effective.
We are interested to know how newcomers envision their ideal resource and aid to learning about healthcare system. We will use our existing partnership with the communities to achieve this goal. As an attempt to share our ideas and encourage active participation from communities, we shared our project idea with a racialized immigrant community in Calgary, Bangladeshi-Canadian during a community knowledge engagement session. With much success, we received overwhelming encouragement and interest to proceed with the project. The community members also volunteered to actively participate in any project development activities.
We aim to welcome interested volunteers to work with us as patient partners and co-lead the project, so we can learn about communities’ needs and desires in having a community-based health navigator for future newcomers. We believe our work will enhance the understanding of the role of community-based health navigators in addressing the inequities persistent in healthcare access for the newcomer communities.
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