Importance: Disparities persist across the trajectory of serious illness, including at the end of life. Patient navigation has been shown to reduce disparities and improve outcomes for underserved populations.
Objective: To determine the effectiveness of a lay patient navigator intervention, Apoyo con Cariño, in improving palliative care outcomes among Hispanic patients.
Latinos are more likely to experience uncontrolled pain, and institutional death, and are less likely to engage in advance care planning. Efforts to increase access to palliative care must maximize primary palliative care and community based models to meet the ever-growing need in a culturally sensitive and congruent manner. Patient navigator interventions are community-based, culturally tailored models of care that have been successfully implemented to improve disease prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe demand for certified nursing assistant (CNA) staff used as 1:1 sitters for safety enhancement and fall prevention can be costly. Through Lean thinking and tools and brainstorming, leaders at Denver Health conceptualized the centralized video monitoring (CVM) program for patient safety. The CVM program reallocated the underutilized talents of CNA sitters as video monitoring technicians (VMT) to meet the challenge of delivering high-quality, cost-effective patient care.
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